Earnest Cape 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 cappa, hooded-cloak. As a color modifier, cape implies a hooded-cloak-and-shoulder-cape quality, the visual register of Spanish-capa-and-Italian-cappa-magna hand-hooded-cloak-and-shoulder-cape Spanish-capa-and-Italian-cappa-magna-and-Portuguese-capa cape-and-hooded-cloak-and-shoulder-cape surfaces under Spanish-capa-and-Italian-cappa-magna-and-Portuguese-capa Iberian-and-Italian-Renaissance Iberian-cape-light. Sits at the modifier-and-textile end of the grid, parallel to cloak and cope 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.