green
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
open dictionary
Access
Free
no sign-up needed
Detailed reference entry for the English word "green", 5-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "green" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "green" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
green is aEnglishnoun. It means: The color of grass and leaves; a primary additive color midway between yellow and blue which is evoked by light between roughly 495–570 nm. Pronounced /ɡɹiːn/. It ranks #771 in English word frequency. Often confused with grew and grey.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | green |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ɡɹiːn/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #771 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for green is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡɹiːn/. Corpus data places it at rank #771 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 14 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for green, with forms such as "geren", "ggreen", and "greenn". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "grew", "grey", "Greg", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Germanic *grōniz Proto-West Germanic *-ī Proto-West Germanic *grōnī Old English grēne Middle English grene English green From Middle English grene, from Old English grēne, from Proto-West Germanic *grōnī, from Proto-Germanic *grōniz, fr… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is green, spelled G-R-E-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The color of grass and leaves; a primary additive color midway between yellow and blue which is evoked by light between roughly 495–570 nm.
- 2A member of a green party; an environmentalist.
- 3A putting green, the part of a golf course near the hole.
- 4The surface upon which bowls is played.
- 5One of the color balls used in snooker, with a value of 3 points.
- 6A public patch of land in the middle of a settlement.
- 7A grassy plain; a piece of ground covered with verdant herbage.
- 8Fresh leaves or branches of trees or other plants; wreaths.
- 9Any substance or pigment of a green color.
- 10A green light used as a signal.
- 11Marijuana.
- 12Money.
- 13One of the three color charges for quarks.
- 14Ellipsis of green room.
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Germanic *grōniz Proto-West Germanic *-ī Proto-West Germanic *grōnī Old English grēne Middle English grene English green From Middle English grene, from Old English grēne, from Proto-West Germanic *grōnī, from Proto-Germanic *grōniz, from Proto-Indo-European *gʰreh₁- (“to grow”). More at grow. Doublet of Gruen. See also North Frisian green, West Frisian grien, Dutch groen, Low German grön, green, greun, German grün, Danish and Norwegian Nynorsk grøn, Swedish grön, Norwegian Bokmål grønn, Icelandic grænn. The sense of obscene, pornographic, or sexual in the Philippines is a semantic loan from Spanish verde. In other varieties of English, blue is the color instead associated with obscenity or pornography.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: geren,ggreen,greenn,gren,grene,grreen,rgeen
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for green
Misspelling Variants of "green"
Frequency rank: #771 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you spell "green"?
What does "green" mean?
What words are commonly confused with "green"?
How do you pronounce "green"?
What is the origin of the word "green"?
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter G in our English index: