Make Your Point: VERDANT

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pronounce VERDANT:

VUR dunt

connect this word to others:

Imagine an untouched rainforest.

It's lush, flourishing, abundant with greenery, t__ming with green plants and trees.

It's verdant.

(To reveal any word with blanks, give it a click.)

definition:

"Verdant" comes from the Latin word for "green," and since the late 1500s, we've used it in English to mean "green," especially in reference to plants and trees, and to places that are full of healthy green plants and trees.

Today, the meaning has narrowed, and "verdant" most often means not just green but green with lush, abundant plant life.

We can also get figurative and call things verdant when they're so healthy and abundant that they remind us of a lush, green field or forest.

And very rarely, we use the word "verdant" figuratively to describe things and people who are "green" in the sense that they're fresh, young, innocent, and easy to fool.

grammatical bits:

Part of speech:

Adjective: "a verdant field;" "The walkway was verdant."

Other forms:

The adverb is "verdantly."

For a noun, you can pick from "verdure" (my preference), "verdancy" (also lovely), and "verdantness" (if you must).

how to use it:

"Verdant" is a beautiful, poetic, semi-common word with a positive tone.

We most often talk literally about verdant hills, fields, forests, scenes, and landscapes: places created by nature. But human-cultivated areas, too, can be called verdant; you could talk about a verdant park, garden, or back yard.

You could also talk figuratively about, say, a verdant vocabulary, or a verdant imagination, to imply that it's flourishing, healthy, and rich in growth.

And to use "verdant" in its other figurative sense ("green: inexperienced, unsophisticated, easily taken advantage of"), you could talk about verdant people, such as verdant buyers who pay the sticker price for cars, or verdant travelers who get their wallets stolen from their back pockets.

examples:

"It was thought that she was half-fairy, for her eyes were as deep and richly verdant as the forest.''
— Malinda Lo, Ash, 2009

"The stagecoach rumbled off, and the four of them stood and gazed upon the verdant meadows of the valley of Heathcote, now spread before them like a lush green blanket laid out for a picnic."
— Maryrose Wood, The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book IV: The Interrupted Tale, 2013

has this page helped you understand "verdant"?

Awesome, I'm glad it helped!

study it:

Explain the one literal meaning and the two figurative meanings of "verdant" without saying "dense with vegetation," "flourishing," or "gullible."

try it out:

Describe a place of verdant beauty that you've visited or hope to visit one day.

Here's my husband carrying our daughter in the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, a place with so much verdant beauty that I still have dreams about it over ten years later. It's a dense rainforest of trees, flowers, birds, streams, and waterfalls.

before you review, play:

Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.

Our game this month is "Coaxed into a Haiku!"

I'll give you the basics of a news story, and you boil the story down into a haiku. You can check out some examples here.

Feel free to take full creative license, omitting or warping the facts, adding dialogue, using slang, cursing, and/or burying the lede. Just do your best to fit the story into a three-line poem of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively.

Try this one today...

"Beyond birds and mice, free‑ranging cats eat a surprising number of insects. It's pretty commonly known, and not very startling, that free-ranging cats eat birds and small rodents. But the degree to which they eat insects might surprise you."
— Christopher A. Lepczyk, Daniel Rubinoff, and Jean E. Fantle-Lepczyk, The Conversation, 8 July 2026

To see one possible haiku, scroll all the way down.

review this word:

1. Opposites of VERDANT in its figurative senses include

A. WISE and BARREN.
B. DILIGENT and SELFISH.
C. COLORFUL and EXHAUSTING.

2. From Jeff Zentner's The Serpent King: "The world was verdant, in contrast to the _____ inside him."

A. inundation [flood]
B. conflagration [fire]
C. desolation [emptiness]

a final word:

I hope you're enjoying Make Your Point. It's made with love.

I'm Liesl Johnson, a reading and writing tutor on a mission to explore, illuminate, and celebrate words.

From my blog:
On vocabulary...
  36 ways to study words.
  Why we forget words, & how to remember them.
  How to use sophisticated words without being awkward.
On writing...
How to improve any sentence.
How to motivate our kids to write.
How to stop procrastinating and start writing.
How to bulk up your writing when you have to meet a word count.

From my heart: a profound thanks to the generous patrons, donors, and sponsors that make it possible for me to write these emails. If you'd like to be a patron or a donor, please click here. If you'd like to be a sponsor and include your ad in an issue, please contact me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com.

A disclaimer: When I write definitions, I use plain language and stick to the words' common, useful applications. If you're interested in authoritative and multiple definitions of words, I encourage you to check a dictionary. Also, because I'm American, I stick to American English when I share words' meanings, usage, and pronunciations; these elements sometimes vary across world Englishes.

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