100 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, switched to green and white in 1963 under another name?

The New York Jets were named for the jet age and for their new home, Shea Stadium, between LaGuardia and Idlewild airports, and dropped the Titans' blue and gold for green and white.

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 is green, a colour usually credited to the adults' diet of seagrass and algae, and it lies in a layer between the inner organs and the shell.

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.

Green is the rarest of the common human eye colours, at about 2% of people; which is the most common worldwide?

Brown eyes belong to well over half of humanity, while green eyes contain no green pigment at all: a little melanin plus light scattered in the iris produces the colour.

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 sold as the Chinese gooseberry, got its modern name from its exporters in 1959?

Kiwifruit reached New Zealand in 1904 as seeds that a school principal, Isabel Fraser, carried home from China, and Turners & Growers renamed it to suit the American market.

Starbucks, whose green logo shows a twin-tailed siren, is named after the chief mate in which seafaring novel?

Moby-Dick's chief mate Starbuck came to mind when co-founder Gordon Bowker read the name 'Starbo' on an old mining map, after the founders went looking for a strong name starting with 'st'.

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, 'green cape', the peninsula at Dakar that is mainland Africa's westernmost point, which Portuguese explorers named a few years before they found the islands.

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

Magnesium sits at the heart of every chlorophyll molecule, which is why spinach and other leafy green vegetables supply so much of it in the diet.

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

Bruce Lee's series lasted a single season in America, but it was such a hit in Hong Kong, where it was known as The Kato Show, that it opened the way to his film career.

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, the green ball is worth three points, one more than which ball potted just before it?

Yellow is worth two points and opens the final run through the colours, 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 bred tough dwarf wheat in Mexico, and after India and Pakistan planted it in the 1960s their wheat yields nearly doubled between 1965 and 1970.

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 Jolly Green Giant stands beside the highway at Blue Earth in which US state, where the brand began?

Minnesota is where the brand began, as the Minnesota Valley Canning Company of Le Sueur in 1903, and the Blue Earth giant was unveiled in 1978, the year the two halves of Interstate 90 met in the town.

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 is where Smith showed neighbours a seedling by a creek on her farm, sprung, she said, from the remains of French crab-apples grown in Tasmania.

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 is still split by a UN-patrolled Green Line, named after the pencil a British general used to draw it?

Nicosia's Green Line was drawn in green pencil on a map by Major-General Peter Young of the British truce force in December 1963, and crossing it stayed tightly restricted until 2003.

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

Germany's Alliance 90/The Greens governed with Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats until 2005, and Fischer, once a street-fighting radical, was foreign minister and vice-chancellor for all 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 traditional colour is green, the colour its scripture gives the silk robes worn in Paradise?

Islam's green runs through the flags of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and from 1977 to 2011 Libya flew a plain green flag with no emblem at all.

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.

Which country's Values Party, founded in 1972, is widely regarded as the world's first national Green party?

New Zealand's Values Party formed in May 1972, weeks after the United Tasmania Group fought a state election in Australia, and it won no seats before giving way to today's Green Party in 1990.

Soul singer Al Green, who later became a pastor and turned to gospel, is best known for which 1972 hit?

'Let's Stay Together' reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972, and four years later Green founded the Full Gospel Tabernacle church in Memphis.

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 is nicknamed the 'green card' after its historical greenish colour?

The Permanent Resident Card was first printed in green in 1946, later came in blue, tan and even pink while keeping its nickname, and went green again with a 2010 redesign.

Which Sesame Street character had orange fur throughout the first season before turning green for good?

Oscar the Grouch began life orange. He later joked in an interview that his green coat is really moss, and that he would be orange again if he ever took a bath.

In L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel, everyone inside the Emerald City must wear which green-tinted item?

Spectacles with green lenses make everything look emerald. The Wizard's capital is in fact no greener than any other city, one more of his humbugs.

The Hulk is famously green, but which colour was he in his 1962 debut issue?

Grey was Stan Lee's choice, a shade he found scary, but the colouring would not stay consistent in print, so Lee turned the Hulk green from the second issue.

Which green vegetable did President George H. W. Bush reportedly ban from Air Force One in 1990?

Broccoli growers hit back by trucking 10 tons of the vegetable to Washington, and the unwanted gift went to a local food bank.

Which US city's plumbers' union dyes the local river bright green each March for Saint Patrick's Day?

Chicago stumbled on the idea in 1961, when plumbers tracing illegal pollution with dye saw it turn the river a vivid green.

Which poison made Scheele's green, a pigment used in Victorian wallpaper and dresses, dangerous to live with?

Arsenic made the pigment toxic: nineteenth-century journals reported children wasting away in bright green rooms and ladies in green dresses swooning.

Which tree-dwelling mammal of South American rainforests can look green because algae grow in its grooved fur?

Sloth fur is a tiny ecosystem: the algae hide the animal from jaguars and harpy eagles, and moths living in the coat help to fertilise the algae.

Which Norse explorer, exiled around 982, reputedly gave Greenland its inviting name to attract settlers?

Erik the Red reasoned, in the saga's telling, that people would be drawn to a land with a favourable name. He then founded its first European settlement.

Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that he couldn't write a book with only how many different words?

50 different words won Dr. Seuss the $50 bet against his editor Bennett Cerf, who made it after The Cat in the Hat had needed 236.

Which greenhouse gas is the most abundant in Earth's atmosphere, causing about half of the greenhouse effect?

Water vapour traps the most heat, but it works as a feedback: warmer air holds more of it, so it amplifies warming begun by gases such as carbon dioxide.

Which Looney Tunes director first coloured Dr. Seuss's Grinch green, for the 1966 television special?

Chuck Jones and Dr. Seuss agreed that green was the only colour that made sense, and every screen Grinch since has kept it.

Which US state, home of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, has a name taken from the French for 'green mountain'?

Vermont only became the name in 1777, when the young republic dropped the name it had first declared independence under, New Connecticut.

Which film, loosely based on a William Steig picture book, won the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature?

Shrek took the brand-new award for 2001, beating Monsters, Inc. and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, the only other nominees.

Which actor played Stanley Ipkiss, a timid bank teller turned green-faced trickster, in the 1994 comedy The Mask?

Jim Carrey was virtually unknown when he was cast, and studio executives fought the choice. The film was also Cameron Diaz's acting debut.

Shakespeare called jealousy a 'green-eyed monster' in which tragedy, where the villain Iago voices the warning?

Othello gave English the phrase. Shakespeare had already linked green eyes to jealousy a few years earlier, in The Merchant of Venice.

Which gas, glowing when struck by charged particles from the Sun, gives the aurora its most common green colour?

Oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere take most of a second to give off their green light, and human eyes are most sensitive to green, so it dominates the display.

Which Augustinian friar worked out the rules of heredity by cross-breeding green and yellow pea plants?

Gregor Mendel grew some 28,000 plants in his monastery garden. Crossing yellow peas with green gave all-yellow offspring, but green came back a generation later.

Which Nintendo hero wears a green cap and tunic, a colour chosen because his 1986 debut was set mostly in a forest?

Link got his green because the hardware allowed only a handful of colours, and it stayed his signature until Breath of the Wild dropped the outfit in 2017.

Rachel Green, the runaway bride turned coffee-house waitress in Friends, was played by which actress?

Jennifer Aniston won the part after Courteney Cox, who was also considered for Rachel, said she preferred to play Monica.

Emerald is the green gem variety of which mineral, which also yields aquamarine and pink morganite?

Beryl turns emerald green only when traces of chromium or vanadium are present, and paler stones are sold simply as green beryl.

Greenland, the world's largest island, is a self-governing territory within which European kingdom?

Denmark proper is tiny beside it: Greenland is by far the largest part of the Danish realm, which also takes in the Faroe Islands.

Which finely ground green tea powder, made from shade-grown leaves, is the centrepiece of the Japanese tea ceremony?

Matcha grew out of powdered-tea practices that Zen Buddhist monks carried home from China, where ground leaf had been whisked into a drink since the Song dynasty.

Which visual-effects technique lets a TV weather presenter stand before a plain green wall that viewers see as a map?

Chroma key favours green and blue backdrops because those hues differ most from every human skin tone, so the presenter is not wiped out along with the wall.

Which US president championed the Army Special Forces' green beret, calling it a mark of distinction in 1961?

John F. Kennedy's backing forged a lasting bond: after his funeral the Special Forces soldier in the honour guard laid his own green beret on the grave.

Guitarist Peter Green founded which band in London in 1967, naming it after its drummer and bass player?

Fleetwood Mac was named partly to tempt bassist John McVie into joining. He at first chose to keep his steady wage with John Mayall's band.

Which green Minecraft monster began as a bug, when Markus Persson swapped the height and length of a pig model?

Creeper models came out tall and thin instead of long and low, and Persson kept the error because the result made a suitably creepy creature.

Which actor won an Oscar for playing pianist Don Shirley in the 2018 Best Picture winner Green Book?

Mahershala Ali won Best Supporting Actor for the role. The film is named after a travel guide for Black motorists that postal worker Victor Hugo Green published from 1936.

The Tour de France's green jersey, first awarded in 1953, is regarded as the prize for which kind of rider?

Sprinters dominate because the jersey rewards high stage finishes and intermediate sprints, not overall time.

Which musical, a Broadway hit since October 2003, follows green-skinned Elphaba and her friendship with Glinda?

Wicked takes its heroine from Gregory Maguire's novel, where the name Elphaba was built from the sound of L. Frank Baum's initials, L.F.B.

Every commercial tree of the Hass variety descends from one 1926 California seedling of which fruit?

Avocado grower Rudolph Hass, a mail carrier, nearly cut the seedling down when his grafts failed, but his children liked its odd, bumpy fruit.

Which 1962 book by biologist Rachel Carson, warning about the pesticide DDT, helped launch the green movement?

Silent Spring was fiercely attacked by chemical companies, but it swayed public opinion and led to a US ban on farm use of DDT and the creation of the EPA.

The fortified Green Zone, seized by US forces in April 2003, lies at the centre of which capital city?

Baghdad's Green Zone became the base of the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose administrators moved into buildings left abandoned after the airstrikes.

Seth Green, Scott Evil in the Austin Powers films, has voiced which Family Guy character since 1999?

Chris Griffin, the teenage son, is Green's main role on the show. Green also co-created the stop-motion sketch show Robot Chicken, which has won him several Emmys.

Edamame, the green pods usually served boiled and salted, are the immature form of which crop?

Soybeans picked young are called edamame, a word first recorded in 1275, when the Japanese monk Nichiren thanked a parishioner for a gift of them.

The word 'greenwashing' was coined in a 1986 essay about hotels urging guests to reuse which items?

Towels were the target: Jay Westerveld noted that hotels asking guests to save the planet did little else for it, while the policy cut their laundry bills.

Which green-clad NBA team won eight straight championships from 1959 to 1966?

Boston Celtics green and Lucky the Leprechaun both nod to the city's large Irish population. The eight-title run is the longest in US professional sport.

Which 1994 Green Day album, the band's third, has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide?

Dookie caught its label off guard: the first 9,000 copies sold out almost at once.

In Stephen King's The Green Mile, the title is a nickname for which part of Cold Mountain Penitentiary?

Death row earned the name from the colour of its linoleum floor. King first released the 1996 story as a serial in six slim volumes.

Which country was home to Wangari Maathai, the Green Belt Movement founder who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize?

Kenya's Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to win the prize, honoured for a movement built on planting trees and defending women's rights.

Which country flew a plain green national flag with no design at all from 1977 to 2011?

Libya adopted the all-green flag under Muammar Gaddafi, and for nearly all of that time it was the world's only national flag of one colour with no design.

Astronomers half-jokingly labelled the first signal from which kind of star 'LGM-1', short for little green men?

Pulsar signals tick so regularly that Jocelyn Bell's team could not at first rule out aliens. Finding a second one elsewhere in the sky ended the speculation.

On the RGB colour wheel used by screens, which colour sits directly opposite green as its complement?

Magenta is green's opposite in light, though painters raised on the older red-yellow-blue wheel are taught that green's complement is red.

Which American sports car has been assembled in Bowling Green, Kentucky, since 1981?

Chevrolet Corvette assembly moved to Bowling Green in 1981, and the city also houses the National Corvette Museum. The first 300 cars were built by hand in Flint.

Which kind of lizard includes a New Guinea genus with bright green blood, caused by a build-up of bile pigment?

Skinks of the genus Prasinohaema carry about 40 times more of the pigment biliverdin than a person with green jaundice. The genus name is Greek for green blood.

In the board game Cluedo, the suspect sold in North America as Mr. Green originally holds which title?

Reverend Green is the local clergyman of the British original. Sets sold in the US and Canada recast him as a businessman, and a 2023 update made him a mayor.

In which Canadian city was Greenpeace born in 1971, as activists chartered a boat to protest a US nuclear test?

Vancouver activists first called themselves the Don't Make a Wave Committee. Their chartered ship, the Phyllis Cormack, was renamed Greenpeace for the voyage.

Red-green colour blindness affects about one man in twelve because the genes involved are carried where?

On the X chromosome: men have only one copy, so a single faulty gene shows, while women usually carry a working spare and only about 1 in 200 is affected.

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's 'Greensward Plan' won the 1858 contest to design which Manhattan landmark?

Central Park's winning plan stood out by sinking its cross-town roads below ground level, keeping the traffic apart from people strolling the lawns.

Which actor played Detective Thorn in Soylent Green, the 1973 thriller set in a starving, overcrowded 2022?

Charlton Heston's co-star Edward G. Robinson was making his final film. Terminally ill throughout the shoot, he died in January 1973, before it reached cinemas.

Which actress played the horticulturalist who weds a Frenchman for convenience in Peter Weir's 1990 comedy Green Card?

Andie MacDowell's character uses the sham marriage to rent her dream apartment. Gérard Depardieu won a Golden Globe as the Frenchman.