green [OE] The defining characteristic of green is that it is the colour of living plants and the word shares an earlier ancestor with *grass. The colour has also long been associated with a sickly complexion, and phrases such as green and wan and green and pale [ME] were once common. To be green around the gills [M19th] is to look or feel ill or nauseous—a person’s gills are the fleshy parts between the jaw and the ears, by analogy with the gills of a fish. An inexperienced person has been called green since the Middle Ages, in reference to the colour of unripe corn, and naïve or gullible people have been green since the beginning of the 17th century (see also salad). Traditionally green has also been the colour of jealousy and envy. In Othello Shakespeare gave us a memorable term for jealousy, the green-eyed monster: ‘O! Beware my lord of jealousy / It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on.’ A person with green fingers [E20th] (or, in the USA, a green thumb) is good at growing plants. The association of the colour with the environmentalist lobby dates from the early 1970s in West Germany. See also yellow.