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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

greenwash.

A false or misleading picture of environmental friendliness used to conceal or obscure damaging activities.

9 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈɡɹiːnwɒʃ/
  1. A false or misleading picture of environmental friendliness used to conceal or obscure damaging activities.

Where this word comes from

Blend of green (“environmentally friendly”) + whitewash (or green + -wash), coined by Jay Westerveld in 1986.

verb/ˈɡɹiːnwɒʃ/
  1. To portray with a false or misleading image of environmental friendliness so as to conceal or obscure damaging activities.

    intransitive · transitive
Where this word comes from

Blend of green (“environmentally friendly”) + whitewash (or green + -wash), coined by Jay Westerveld in 1986.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.