Velvety Jolly Forest

An adjectival form of velvet, used since the eighteenth century for colors that read as if they had the matte light-absorbing quality of velvet. Implies high saturation combined with a non-glossy surface — the matte richness of a deep wine in a fabric rather than in a glass. Sits in the bold-and-deep corner of the grid alongside plush and lush.

Old French jolif, festive-and-pretty. As a color modifier, jolly implies a hearty-and-warm-and-festive quality, the visual register of Dickens-Christmas-and-Falstaffian-jolly hand-hearty-and-warm-and-festive Dickens-Christmas-and-Falstaffian-and-Pickwickian jollied-and-hearty-and-warm-and-festive surfaces under Dickens-Christmas-and-Falstaffian-and-Pickwickian goose-and-plum-pudding-and-roaring-hearth Christmas-Eve-light. Sits at the modifier-and-mood end of the grid, parallel to merry and mirth 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.