50 Fun Facts About Green

Which metal, oxidising into a verdigris patina after 1900, gives the Statue of Liberty its colour?

Copper oxidised into the patina that spread across the statue shortly after 1900, and Congress, taking it for corrosion, voted money to paint the whole thing before being talked out of it.

Which football team, founded in 1959 as the Titans, was renamed in 1963 to rhyme with its Shea Stadium co-tenant?

The New York Jets also took the name because the team would play near LaGuardia Airport, and the franchise joined the NFL in the 1970 AFL–NFL merger.

Most 'wasabi' paste served outside Japan is a dyed mixture based on which cheaper root vegetable?

Horseradish, mustard, starch and green food colouring or spinach powder make up the usual substitute, while real wasabi is grated from a plant in the same family as mustard.

The green sea turtle takes its name from the colour of which part of the animal, rather than its olive-to-black shell?

Its body fat turns green from a diet of almost nothing but seagrass and sits in a layer between the inner organs and the shell, while the carapace itself is olive to black.

Which English king is popularly but wrongly credited with composing the folk tune 'Greensleeves'?

Henry VIII gets the credit by myth alone; the ballad was first registered in London in 1580, more than thirty years after his death, and the tune is used as a motif in SIX, the musical about his wives.

Roughly what share of the world's population has green eyes, the rarest of the common human eye colours?

About 2% of people worldwide have green eyes, and children born with them often watch the colour darken as they grow up.

In which 1925 novel does the narrator watch his neighbour reach toward a green light at the end of a dock?

The Great Gatsby ends with Nick staring across the bay at the light on Daisy's dock, the image Fitzgerald turns into his closing line about boats borne back into the past.

Which US state has an official State Question, 'Red or green?', about the chile sauce on a dish?

New Mexico is the only state with an official question, and the official answer, 'Christmas', means red and green chile on the same plate.

Which fruit, once exported as the Chinese gooseberry, was renamed by New Zealand growers in 1959?

Kiwifruit got its new name after a US client warned that 'Chinese gooseberry' was struggling to clear quarantine, and the vine is native to central and eastern China, not New Zealand.

Which coffee chain, founded at Seattle's Pike Place Market in 1971, puts a twin-tailed siren on its green logo?

Starbucks began as a coffee-bean wholesaler run by three founders, and the company describes the figure on the logo as a twin-tailed mermaid, or siren, from Greek mythology.

Which tennis tournament, the oldest in the world, uses dark green and purple as its official colours?

Wimbledon's own radio station has opened with a theme called 'Purple and Green', composed by Tony Cox, since 1996.

Which ballpark's 37-foot left-field wall, covered in tin and concrete in 1934, is nicknamed the Green Monster?

Fenway Park's wall is wood underneath, and in 1934 owner Tom Yawkey also flattened the sloping 'Duffy's Cliff' that fielders had to climb in front of it.

Which island nation, uninhabited until Portuguese settlers came in the 1400s, is named after a Senegalese peninsula?

Cape Verde takes its name from Cap-Vert, the peninsula at Dakar that is mainland Africa's westernmost point, some 600 to 850 km east of the islands.

Which metal sits at the centre of the chlorophyll molecule, as iron does in the haem of blood?

Magnesium was found in chlorophyll in 1906, the first time the element had been detected in living tissue at all.

Which martial artist played Kato, the masked hero's valet and partner, in ABC's 1966 series The Green Hornet?

Bruce Lee's series ran a single season, and as of 2026 licensing disputes had kept the Van Williams-Lee episodes off home video even though they still aired on television.

At which store chain's lunch counter did four Black students begin the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins?

Woolworth's Greensboro store is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, and the protests led the chain to drop its segregation policy across the South.

US paper money nicknamed 'greenbacks' for its green reverse was first issued as emergency currency during which war?

The American Civil War notes were fiat money, made legal tender by Congress in February 1862 but unusable for customs duties or interest on the public debt.

Which knight of the Round Table beheads a mysterious Green Knight, who then picks up his head and sets a return blow?

Sir Gawain must seek the Green Knight a year and a day later to take the return blow, a 'beheading game' motif that first appears in the 8th-century Irish tale Bricriu's Feast.

Which film famously lost the Best Picture Oscar to How Green Was My Valley, John Ford's 1941 Welsh mining drama?

Citizen Kane lost to a film that took five of its ten nominations; the novel's author Richard Llewellyn, who claimed the story came from his own life, turned out to be English-born and to have spent little time in Wales.

Which French liqueur, made by Carthusian monks from 130 plants, gave its name to a yellow-green colour?

Chartreuse gets its colour from a final maceration of plants, and the full recipe is known only to a handful of the monks who make it.

Which anise-flavoured spirit, nicknamed 'the green fairy', was banned in France and the United States by 1915?

Absinthe, la fée verte in French, has never been shown to be more dangerous than ordinary spirits, and the bans swept the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria-Hungary too.

In snooker, how many points is the green ball worth, potted after the yellow in the colours sequence?

Three points for the green sits between yellow at two and brown at four, in a game first played by British Army officers in India with 22 balls on the table.

Which American country singer wrote 'Forty Shades of Green' during a 1959 visit to Ireland?

Johnny Cash first released the song in 1961 as the B-side of 'The Rebel–Johnny Yuma', and it later landed on his Ring of Fire best-of collection.

Which singer took 'Green, Green Grass of Home', learned from a Jerry Lee Lewis record, to number one in 1966?

Tom Jones found the record at Colony Records in New York while in town for The Ed Sullivan Show; Curly Putman wrote the song and Porter Wagoner first made it a country hit.

Which Memphis instrumental group recorded 'Green Onions' in 1962, first issued as a B-side on the Volt label?

Booker T. & the M.G.'s were the Stax house band, with Steve Cropper on guitar, Al Jackson on drums and Lewie Steinberg on bass behind Jones's organ.

Which band released 'Green River', a song about a childhood holiday spot, as a single in July 1969?

Creedence Clearwater Revival put the single out a month before the album of the same name, and Cash Box ranked it the number 19 single of 1969.

Which Sesame Street composer wrote 'Bein' Green' for Kermit the Frog, a song later covered by Frank Sinatra?

Joe Raposo's song reached Sinatra's 1971 album Sinatra & Company, and that recording came back to Sesame Street under an animated insert by Étienne Delessert.

Which wealthy Star City businessman is the secret identity of DC Comics' archer hero Green Arrow?

Oliver Queen was killed off in the 1990s and replaced by his son Connor Hawke, then brought back in the 2001 'Quiver' storyline written by Kevin Smith.

Which agronomist, the 'father of the Green Revolution', won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for raising food supplies?

Norman Borlaug is one of only seven people to hold the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal together.

Which Cornish attraction, built in a reclaimed china-clay pit, houses one of the world's largest indoor rainforests?

The Eden Project's larger biome simulates a rainforest and its second a Mediterranean climate, and the whole site took two and a half years to build.

Who ran for US president in 2000 as the Green Party nominee, taking about 2.7% of the vote?

Ralph Nader's 2,882,955 votes came in his second run as the Green nominee, after a passive campaign on the party's ballot line in 1996.

A 55-foot fibreglass statue of the Jolly Green Giant stands beside US Route 169 in which Minnesota town?

Blue Earth's statue stands sixty miles south of the wooden 'Welcome to the Valley' sign, and the brand began with the Minnesota Valley Canning Company, founded in Le Sueur in 1903.

Which US state first found the emerald ash borer, a beetle that has killed tens of millions of ash trees, in 2002?

Michigan's Canton was where the beetle was identified, though it may have been in the US since the late 1980s, and it now threatens most of North America's 8.7 billion ash trees.

Pesto, the basil sauce pounded with pine nuts, garlic and pecorino, originated in which Ligurian port city?

Genoa's earlier signature sauce was agliata, a mash of garlic and walnuts, and basil only became pesto's main ingredient around the 1850s.

Maria Ann Smith found the Granny Smith apple as a chance seedling in 1868 at Eastwood, now a suburb of which city?

Sydney's Eastwood was home to Smith, who had emigrated from Beckley in East Sussex in 1839 with her husband Thomas.

British sailors were called 'limeys' because the Royal Navy added citrus juice to their grog to prevent which disease?

Scurvy is a vitamin C deficiency, and processed, stored lime juice lost so much of the vitamin that lime-based grog eventually failed to prevent it.

Which gas did Humphry Davy name in 1810 from the Ancient Greek for 'pale green', the colour it shows?

Chlorine had been proposed as a pure element in 1809, and Davy confirmed it the following year, naming the greenish-yellow gas for its colour.

Which capital, divided since 1974, is split by a Green Line named after the colour of a UN officer's pen?

Nicosia's line has been crossable only since April 2003, when the Ledra Palace checkpoint opened for the first time since the island was divided in 1974.

Which country's Greens entered national government in 1998, with Joschka Fischer as foreign minister?

Germany's Alliance 90/The Greens served in Gerhard Schröder's cabinet until 2005, and Fischer, a former street activist, held both posts for the full seven years.

Which city's East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue got an early electric red-green traffic signal in August 1914?

Cleveland's signal came two years after Salt Lake City policeman Lester Wire built the first electric traffic light in 1912, and the amber 'caution' light was a later addition.

Which religion's historic colour is green, representing the vegetation of Paradise and the banner of its prophet?

Islam's colour appears in the flags of nearly all Islamic countries, where the green recalls the lush gardens promised in Paradise.

Which country gets almost 100% of its electricity from hydropower and geothermal sources, piping the heat into homes?

Iceland's geothermal steam fields heat everything from houses to swimming pools through district-heating networks, while hydropower supplies about 70% of the electricity.

In which year did the United Tasmania Group and New Zealand's Values Party first contest elections as Green parties?

1972 saw the Tasmanian group contest an April state election and the Values Party fight New Zealand's November general election, the first parties anywhere to run on a mainly environmental platform.

Soul singer Al Green, an ordained pastor who turned to gospel in the 1980s, is best known for which 1972 signature hit?

'Let's Stay Together' crowned an early-1970s run that also included 'Tired of Being Alone' in 1971 and 'Take Me to the River' in 1974; Green was born Albert Leornes Greene.

Robin Hood's Merry Men wore a green cloth named after which English city, praised in 1612 for dyeing the best green?

Lincoln green was cheaper than scarlet, which needed the Mediterranean kermes insect for its dye, and a ballad of about 1510 has the outlaws casting off their grey for it.

Royal members of which Chinese dynasty were buried in ceremonial suits of jade pieces threaded with gold or silver wire?

Han emperors' suits used gold thread while princes, princesses, dukes and marquises got silver, and everyone below the aristocracy was forbidden a jade suit at all.

A Masters champion must return the green jacket to the Augusta National clubhouse after keeping it for how long?

One year later the jacket goes into a designated cloakroom with other champions' jackets, though it stays the winner's personal property, and a repeat winner reuses his first jacket.

Which element did William Crookes name in 1861 from the Greek for 'green shoot', after its bright green spectral line?

Thallium turned up in residues from sulfuric acid production, and Claude-Auguste Lamy found it independently the same year using the new method of flame spectroscopy.

Which country's currency is named after its national bird, whose tail feathers the ancient Maya used as money?

Guatemala's quetzal was introduced in 1925 under President José María Orellana, whose face appears on the one-quetzal note.

Which US immigration document, nicknamed for its historical greenish colour, proves residency in the United States?

Permanent Resident Card applications were decided by the Immigration and Naturalization Service until 2003, when that agency was abolished and the Department of Homeland Security took over.