Welsh Word of the Day: Gwyrdd (green)

Gwyrdd (green) is one of the colours most associated with Cymru (Wales), due to its prominence on our national baner (flag). Y ddraig goch (the red dragon) stands proud on a background of gwyrdd and gwyn (white).

While the draig (dragon) brings to mind bravery, passion, and patriotism, the symbolism of the tir (land) beneath its feet seems a little simpler – it’s gwyrdd, like the beautiful bryniau (hills) of Wales.

Gwyrdd can be deceptively tricky to pronounce for a one-syllable word. The gw sound isn’t natural in English, and remember that the dd at the end is like the th in that, not the th in thin or the d in dog.

You can break it up by saying it as two syllables, starting with goo, and then speeding it up until you’re saying it smoothly.

When you do this, the second syllable sounds like urdd (league), as in Urdd Gobaith Cymru (Wales’ League of Hope), a really popular Welsh youth organisation which promotes the Welsh culture and language to young people, including by putting on a young people’s Eisteddfod. If you’ve not come across this, it’s a Welsh cultural festival centred around competitions in the arts.

This similarity in sound provides a very useful rhyme for the opening lines of Urdd Gobaith Cymru’s ‘theme song’, Hei Mistar Urdd, which is about Urdd Gobaith Cymru’s mascot, Mistar Urdd.

He’s an anthropomorphised triangle of coch (red), gwyn (white), and gwyrdd (green) – representing, of course, the aforementioned colours of the Welsh baner.

You can listen to Hei Mr Urdd here, although be warned, it’s a bit of an earworm!

Despite its difficult pronunciation, gwyrdd is actually a closer word to home for English speakers than it may seem. This is because it’s not from a native Celtic root and is instead a borrowing from Latin. Proto-Brythonic adopted a form of the Latin viridis (green), which actually gave us the word for green in French (vert) and Italian (verde) too, plus many more European languages.

There are technically three separate forms of gwyrdd. The masculine form is gwyrdd itself, the feminine form is gwerdd, and the plural form is gwyrddion.

Here are some examples with masculine, feminine, and plural nouns:

• drws gwyrdd = a green door
• ffrog werdd = a green dress
• llyffantod gwyrdd / llyffantod gwyrddion = green toads

I’ve given the final example with both the plural and the default masculine form. This is because, as you may know, most Welsh speakers today do not use the special plural forms of adjectives except in very formal or literary contexts. So it doesn’t sound incorrect to use just gwyrdd when describing a plural noun.

Another thing you might have noticed is that in the feminine example, we’ve not just used the feminine form gwerdd but also knocked the g off the beginning. This is just following the rule that feminine nouns cause a soft mutation to adjectives that follow them – meaning that in practice we always see gwerdd as werdd.

In some cases, the default masculine form can also mutate, like this:

It can also change in other ways, for example to create comparative forms of itself. These are gwyrddach (greener), gwyrddaf (greenest), and gwyrdded.

The last, gwyrdded, is a special kind of comparative adjective form that doesn’t exist in English, called the equative form. It means roughly equally green, but to utilise this meaning in a full sentence you need to insert it into the phrase cyn wyrdded â (as green as). And here, of course, it’s also taken a soft mutation again. Welsh words bend into a lot of different shapes!

And it’s not really just an adjective but also a noun, meaning the colour green. Meaning you can say things like fy hoff liw yw gwyrdd / fy hoff liw ydy gwyrdd (my favourite colour is green).

Here, liw is a soft mutation of lliw (colour). It’s caused by hoff (favourite) – adjectives that go in front of the noun are not the norm in Welsh and they cause a soft mutation when this does happen, as with hoff. And the two options above are equally correct, yw and ydy are just synonyms (they mean is) used in different parts of the country, generally more Southward and more Northward respectively.

Of course your hoff liw might not actually be gwyrdd, in which case you’ll need to know the word for the rest of the cysefin (primary), eilradd (secondary) and other lliwiau (colours).

• melyn = yellow
• gwyn = white
• oren = orange
• coch = red
• pinc = pink
• porffor = purple
• du = black
• llwyd = grey
• glas = blue (usually… but we’ll get onto that in a moment)

As you might expect, gwyrdd appears in a lot of natur (nature) and planhigion (plants)-related vocabulary in Welsh. Plus, it’s used in the name of amgylcheddol organisations and campaign groups, both those that are specific to Cymru and the translated Welsh names of those that are UK-wide, like y Blaid Werdd (the Green Party) in Parliament.

It’s a colour that represents gwanwyn (springtime) and tyfiad (growth) across the word, and Wales is no different.

Neither can we deny the fact that a lot of things in natur literally are just gwyrdd 😉

Here are some examples. Be warned, though, that words for planhigion and anifeiliaid are some of those that vary most across the country!

• coedwyrdd = wintergreen
• eirin gwyrdd(ion) = greengages
• pibydd gwyrdd = green sandpiper
• cnocell werdd = green woodpecker
• gwennol werdd = green swallow
• llinach werdd / gwyrddbinc = greenfinch
• menyn gwyrdd = an old-fashioned word for unsalted butter!

There would likely be many if not for one interesting linguistic fact…

You see, despite showing up in all these places, gwyrdd wasn’t always the word for green in Welsh. It is absolutely the most common and natural choice today, but it wasn’t that long ago that the word glas (blue) meant blue, green, and grey in the Welsh language, working as part of a unique colour scheme.

It’s actually more common than you’d think to have blue and green described by the same word. Languages as far and wide as Vietnamese and Yoruba (and Welsh!) have this feature. And many languages prefer to distinguish between golau (light) blue-green and tywyll (dark) blue-green than to split blue and green up themselves… kind of like we distinguish between coch (red) and pinc (pink, which is really just light red).

Though glas is almost always just used for blue today, its old meaning as green or grey does remain in some fossilised expressions, particularly those about natur (nature). For example, glaswellt (grass) combines the word glas with gwellt (grass or straw). I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen more green glaswellt than I have blue!

Another one would be the word glasu, which has a few meanings but which can describe something beginning to tyfu (grow) and turn gwyrdd. Still, you could probably get away with saying gwyrddio for this today.

Basically, if you do fancy changing things up – particularly in poetry or other descriptive, literary writing – and using glas instead of gwyrdd, it makes most sense to do this when describing things that tyfu. Indeed, glas has sometimes been used to describe less a colour than even the state of something being newydd (new), ifanc (young), and yn blaguro (sprouting).

It doesn’t have to be a rivalry between the two words, either. They can be combined to make the word gwyrddlas or glaswyrdd (I use the former but I’ve heard the latter used quite a bit too), which can mean either green or turquoise.

Here are some more ways to describe shades of gwyrdd in Welsh:

• gwyrdd golau = light green
• gwyrddloyw = bright green
• gwyrdd tywyll = dark green
• lliw emrallt = emerald green
• melynwyrdd / lliw olewydd = olive green
• llwydwyrdd = sage green
• gwyrdd y môr / morwyrdd = sea green
• ir / iraidd / irlas = another word for a bright green, growing, or verdant

Again, these are particularly good for cerddi (poems) – or you might come across them when reading an older Welsh text.

Which is your favourite?