Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
🌱 Rich vegetation 🟩 Green color 🍏 Not ripe 🌍 Eco-friendliness
greenness

greenness

5.6
How unripe fruit or vegetables are
  • noun
  • /ˈɡriːn.nəs/
translation icon : inmadurez
  • She noticed the greenness of the tomatoes, indicating they needed more time to ripen.

Examples

  • The greenness of the oranges made it clear that they had been picked too early.

  • The greenness of the unripe bananas meant they were not sweet enough to eat.

  • I realized my confounded greenness had tricked me into saying something stupid.

    Fiction book (1993)

Antonyms

ripeness
3 2.5

How ready fruit is to eat or harvest

How Ripe

overripe
7 3.0
ripeness
3 2.5
greenness
5.6

Surface Forms

greenness singular
greennesses plural

Morphology

greenness = green (transparent) = green + ness

Regular nominalization from the adjective 'green'; 'green' commonly extends to mean 'unripe', so the derivation is straightforward.

Etymology

Greenness is formed from green and -ness, and green also once meant 'young' or 'not yet ready'. So the greenness of fruit means it is 'not ripe' yet, the same idea as calling someone 'green' when they are inexperienced.