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viridian (vuh-RID-ee-uhn) - n., a bluish-green pigment made from hydrated chromium oxide; a saturated bluish-green color.
This was a rabbit hole. Let's start with the order of definitions -- usually I'd put the color first, but the pigment, created and named in the 1830s but a French painter and paint-maker named either Christophe Pannetier or Antoine Pannetier (sources also give a third possible personal name, and I don't have enough time to suss out the truth), came first. Before then, the best bright green paint available was emerald green, which had arsenic in it and so poisonous, so Pannetier's formulation was immediately popular. It was laborious to produce, however, and so both expensive and not commonly used outside of France until chemist C. E. Guignet developed a cheaper manufacturing process in 1859. The color itself is roughly halfway between pure green and teal, and chromium is also used as part of institutional green paint. The name was coined from Latin viridis, green, itself from vireĊ, be verdant/sprout/flourish (verdant is from the same word, only after being passed through Old and Middle French).
---L.
This was a rabbit hole. Let's start with the order of definitions -- usually I'd put the color first, but the pigment, created and named in the 1830s but a French painter and paint-maker named either Christophe Pannetier or Antoine Pannetier (sources also give a third possible personal name, and I don't have enough time to suss out the truth), came first. Before then, the best bright green paint available was emerald green, which had arsenic in it and so poisonous, so Pannetier's formulation was immediately popular. It was laborious to produce, however, and so both expensive and not commonly used outside of France until chemist C. E. Guignet developed a cheaper manufacturing process in 1859. The color itself is roughly halfway between pure green and teal, and chromium is also used as part of institutional green paint. The name was coined from Latin viridis, green, itself from vireĊ, be verdant/sprout/flourish (verdant is from the same word, only after being passed through Old and Middle French).
---L.
