Sturdy Pile Forest

Old French estourdi, stunned, reckless — drifted in English to mean robust, well-built. Used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as durable and unfussy — the working browns of saddle leather, the working greens of pasture wool. Sits in the bold-and-warm corner alongside robust and solid.

Old French pile, raised-cut-thread. As a color modifier, pile implies a raised-cut-thread-and-velvet quality, the visual register of velvet-and-corduroy-and-pile-rug hand-cut-and-raised-thread velvet-and-corduroy-and-pile-rug-textile surfaces under velvet-and-corduroy-and-pile-rug textile workshop-light. Sits at the modifier-and-texture end of the grid, parallel to plush and nap 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.