Green or Gray?
Our take
It’s always a pleasure when a friend sends a link that feels… precisely *right*. Beth of the Cassandra Pages, a friend we remember fondly from a Montreal visit way back in '04 (seriously, look at those photos if you need a blast from the past: Montreal 1, Montreal 2), just did that with a post from Kate Davies’s Scottish knitting blog. The topic? The fascinating divergence in how we perceive color, specifically the difference between “green” and “grœg.” It’s not just about subjective experience—though that’s certainly a part of it—but about linguistic history, the gradual shifting of language, and the way our etymological roots shape our current understanding. And that, my friends, is *exactly* the kind of rabbit hole Spoot lives for. It reminds us of something we explored years ago, delving into the fascinating world of lost words and semantic drift – Semantic Antics. The tiny, almost invisible shifts in meaning over centuries; the way a word can carry the weight of history even as its contemporary usage becomes simplified.
Kate Davies's post, and Beth's subsequent commentary, highlights a crucial point: language isn’t a static, universal dictionary. It’s a living, breathing, evolving organism, shaped by geography, culture, and the subtle pressures of everyday communication. "Grœg," as Davies explains, represents an older, more nuanced understanding of green, a shade that might encompass everything from a muted olive to a mossy grey. The shift to a more binary “green-or-not-green” classification is a simplification, a pruning of linguistic possibilities. Think about it; isn’t this what happens with so many things? We flatten, categorize, compartmentalize. It’s the human tendency to impose order on the wonderfully messy reality around us. We saw a similar phenomenon in our exploration of culinary traditions—how seemingly simple dishes like bruschetta have complex histories and evolving definitions, The Science of Bruschetta. It’s about more than just tomatoes on bread; it's about regional variations, generational shifts in ingredients, and the constant negotiation of what constitutes “authentic.”
The broader significance here extends beyond color perception or knitting terminology. It touches on the very nature of knowledge and how our understanding of the world is mediated by the language we use. Consider, for a moment, how language has shaped our understanding of migration – the ways we frame narratives of movement, displacement, and belonging. It’s a subject that’s been at the forefront of global discourse, and a deeper understanding of linguistic nuance is critical to fostering empathy and informed dialogue. The way we articulate these experiences impacts how we understand them, and how we respond to them. How Humans Migrated Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Animated Look offers a compelling visual summary, but the words we use to describe those journeys hold a deeper, often overlooked, power. This isn’t about finding the “correct” word—language isn't about correctness, it's about connection—but about being mindful of the history embedded within the words we choose.
So, where does this leave us? Well, it leaves us wondering: what other subtle shifts in language are obscuring our understanding of the world? What concepts have we unknowingly pruned, simplified, or flattened through linguistic evolution? And, perhaps more importantly, are we actively seeking out those lost shades—those grœgs—hidden just below the surface of our everyday language? Because if we aren’t, we might be missing something vital. Something slippery, narrow, and surprisingly illuminating. Stay spooty.
Beth of the Cassandra Pages is an old friend (my wife and I visited her in Montreal in 2004: 1, 2) and it’s always a pleasure to hear from her; she’s sent me a link to You see grēne where I see grœg from a Scottish knitting blog written by Kate Davies, whom Beth calls “a very smart designer,” and while it’s mostly about colors themselves, there’s enough linguistic material I thought I’d bring it here.
Your responses to yesterday’s piece – in which I introduced KC’s fabulous Chingly Yorlin – really interested me. In both the Ravelry group and newsletter comments, many of you suggested that you do not see Chingly as I do – as a greenish-grey – but as very definitely green. […] Whether we see / name a colour as “green” or “grey” can depend on many factors: the physical mechanics of perception, our cultural heritage, our linguistic positioning, and (it is now increasingly clear) our age. […]
As grey is one of those shades which, for many of us it seems, perpetually hovers in an area of chromatic indeterminacy, you may be interested to know that, in some languages, it is among the first colours to be named. In Old English, grœg (grey, grey-ish) is a basic colour term (or BCT) that appears in the language at an earlier date than blue (hœwen) and which is used in a wide variety of contexts in reference to everything from wolves and stones to stormy seas.* [*My discussion of of grey and green in Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic draws heavily on Carole Biggham and Kirsten Wolf’s excellent A Cultural History of Colour in the Medieval Age, volume 2 in Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Colour series (2021; 2024)]
Gren (grēne) is a BCT that precedes blue in the Old English language too: in reference to freshness or newness, to un-ripe or uncooked things, to glassy gemstones and to metals with a colourful patina, such as copper or brass. Grēne also frequently appears in Old English place names in association with landmarks, property boundaries, and objects in the natural world, such as paths, hills, and trees.
While grēne and grœg are both Old English BCTs, then, grey is also associated with a surprising number of non-basic, or secondary terms in this language such as hasu (a brown-ish grey which is used in reference to the plumage of many birds) and fealu (a pale, yellow-ish or red-ish-grey).
Grey and green (grár and grœn) are BCTs in Old Norse-Icelandic too, with grár possessing, as Kirsten Wolf puts it, “stability of reference across Old Norse-Icelandic texts spanning several centuries and across various types of vocabulary” By the time of the very earliest literary documents in Old Norse-Icelandic, grár possesses, in Wolf’s words “a well-established achromatic meaning (without hue).” Her work shows how the development and consolidation of grar as one of the earliest Old Norse-Icelandic BCTs historically preceded that of grœnn (green).
Fascinatingly, while grey is one of the earliest and well-documented colour terms in these northern languages, it is emphatically not so in those of the European south or east: in Latin, Greek, or Old East Slavi[c] (Old Russian) grey is very low down in the list of early-documented shades.
My own linguistic parameters remain rather narrowly European, and I unfortunately know nothing about the development or consolidation of grey / green BCTs in Mandarin or Japanese, Urdu or Punjabi (perhaps speakers of these languages can enlighten us?). But I often find myself wondering just how far the long linguistic / cultural heritage of those of us who speak the modern European languages which arose out of Old English and Icelandic, Latin and Greek, affects the very particular ways in which we now see, describe, and understand rather blurry colour concepts such as “grey” and “green”.
The rest is about perception, and is interesting in its own right; there are a great many gorgeous photographs as well. As for the Old English words, grǣġ (her “grœg,” with the wrong ligature) is the West Saxon form of what is also written grei(g) ‘gray/grey’; hǽwen (again, her “hœwen” has the wrong ligature) is s.v. haw (“Obsolete exc. Scottish”) in the OED, which defines it as “Blue, azure; bluish, grayish- or greenish-blue”; hasu, from Proto-West Germanic *hasu, has left no modern descendant but has a relative in French hâve ‘gaunt’; and fealu is modern fallow ‘pale red or yellow, light brown.’ The OED says of it:
The semantic range of the word as a colour term in early use in English, as well as the other older Germanic languages, has been the subject of considerable discussion, especially its use in Old English verse, where it occurs in some unexpected contexts, e.g. describing the sea or its waves (this particular usage survives into Middle English verse; compare quots. OE³, c1440 at sense A.1). It has been suggested that such early uses may imply a degree of brightness rather than a specific hue. Compare also the use with reference to pallor of the human face (compare quot. c1405 at sense A.1 and also fallow v.¹ 2).
Thanks, Beth!
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