Where the Green name comes from

Green is a place before it is a colour: the family lived beside the village green. It could also start as a nickname for somebody who simply liked the colour. The word itself runs back through the Middle English grene to the Old English grene and a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to grow, which is the same root that gives English the word grow. Green is often a translation as well, taken up by families who had been Grun or Gruen in German, Groen in Dutch, or O hUaini in Irish, from uaine.