Why is green the colour of envy?
Green with envy – very envious Before Shakespeare, a green complexion (i.e. pale and sickly) was associated with other things besides envy: these included fear, ill-humor and illness. In a famous passage Iago warns Othello to ‘beware, my lord, of jealousy;/It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on’ (III, 3, lines 169-71), a metaphor from the green-eyed cat family which is prone to play with (mock) its victims as a cat plays with a mouse. Though green has continued to have other associations, notably immaturity and gullibility, it is envy that now predominates.
