Earnest Arch Forest

Old English eornost, seriousness, zeal. Used as a color modifier since the nineteenth century for hues that read as committed but unshowy — the working blues of denim, the deep greens of Quaker meetinghouses. Sits in the bold-and-quiet corner of the grid, slightly less luminous than resolute and slightly less institutional than imperial.

Latin arcus, bow / curve. As a color modifier, arch implies a Roman-and-Gothic-and-Romanesque-vault quality, the visual register of Roman-aqueduct-and-Romanesque-cathedral hand-cut stone-and-brick voussoir-and-keystone arch-and-vault architectural surfaces under monumental architecture light. Sits at the modifier-and-architecture end of the grid, parallel to dome and vault in usage.

The dense canopy of a temperate or tropical woodland — oak, beech, pine, eucalyptus, mahogany — wherever leaves close above to filter the light below. Forest green refers to the average reflectance of a healthy mid-summer canopy seen from below: a saturated, slightly muted green with the matte finish of layered chlorophyll. Deeper than fern, cooler than olive, with the ecological weight of a word that has named every wooded biome on Earth.