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PlainSpell

greenfinch

/ˈɡɹin.fɪnt͡ʃ/noun

greenfinch is a noun meaning “Any bird within the genus Chloris (formerly a subset of the genus Carduelis), small passerine songbirds with yellow-green plumage, found throughout…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled G-R-E-E-N-F-I-N-C-H and has 2 syllables, and it appears about once in every 38 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of greenfinch is greenfinches.

What does greenfinch mean?

noun

  1. 1

    Any bird within the genus Chloris (formerly a subset of the genus Carduelis), small passerine songbirds with yellow-green plumage, found throughout Eurasia.

  2. 2

    European greenfinch, a common Old World finch (Chloris chloris, syn. Carduelis chloris,Fringilla Chloris),mainly green with yellow in the wings and tail.

  3. 3

    informalA female member of the Ulster Defence Regiment.

  4. 4

    UKinformalslangA female member of the Royal Irish Regiment.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce greenfinch?

  • UK /ˈɡɹiːn.fɪnt͡ʃ/
  • US /ˈɡɹin.fɪnt͡ʃ/

Greenfinch has 2 syllables (counted from the pronunciation).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Qwertygiy-greenfinch.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of greenfinch

  • greenfinches plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is greenfinch?

Greenfinch appears about once in every 38 million words in written English, the 189,524th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Greenfinch in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense genus Chloris:

LanguageWords
Frenchverdier
GermanGrünfink, Grünling
Portugueseverdilhão
Spanishverderón

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does greenfinch come from?

Compound of green + finch.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).