Has ‘greenlit’ been greenlighted?

The verb greenlight, or green-light, means to give something approval or permission to proceed: you give it the green light, metaphorically. What past-tense form of the verb would you use in these lines?

HBO just [greenlight] Season 2.

Marting said it [greenlight] less conventional works.

The lines are from recent articles in the New York Times. The first uses greenlit; the second, greenlighted. So whatever you chose you probably concurred once, but only once, with the NYT.

If you’re wondering which is correct, the short answer is both. The long answer – well, you’re in the right place for that.

In this post I’ll look at the usage patterns of greenlit and greenlighted, based on corpus data (graphs! lots of graphs!). I’ll describe the verb’s origins and analyze it with reference to irregular verbs generally and -light compounds specifically. Finally, I’ll discuss which to choose, with an eye on future trends.

A variable verb

The greenlighted–greenlit discrepancy is oddly absent from the dozen or so style guides and usage dictionaries that I checked. This may be because the verb is still quite restricted to business contexts, or because it has gained prominence only recently.

Most major online dictionaries that enter the verb – including the OED, AHD, Collins, Oxford Learner’s, and Dictionary.com – list both variants, sometimes hyphenated: green-lit, green-lighted. Macmillan Dictionary listed greenlighted only, before the dictionary was scrapped this year.

I was struck anew by the variation when I saw both forms in the same article: an oral history of Planes, Trains and Automobiles in Vanity Fair. First, associate producer Bill Brown recalls an evening in L.A. when John Hughes pitched the idea for the film:

This is a Wednesday night at dinner, just casual, sitting around talking about it. The following Tuesday, it was a greenlit picture at Paramount.

To be clear, greenlit is functioning as a participial adjective here, but it’s a common past-tense form. Meanwhile, journalist Jason Bailey writes:

Paramount had greenlighted the picture, but with a catch.

Vanity Fair‘s Slanguage Dictionary has two relevant entries: greenlight (‘the go-ahead for a film to be made’); and green lit, which is a verb phrase but is glossed as if it’s a noun: ‘process that follows after a script has been developed and moves into production’.

A search on vanityfair.com suggests that house style – the conventions formalized by a particular publisher – is not imposed either way. VF currently has 177 stories with greenlit (110) or green-lit (67), 75 with greenlighted (36) or green-lighted (39): a far more evenly distributed ratio than we’d expect if a style were being systematically applied.

Publishers and editors like consistency, so this variation is apt to be addressed in style sheets and usage manuals in the years ahead. For now, it may have escaped their notice or they may be waiting to see which way the wind blows, morphologically speaking. More on that below.

Corpus data

Google’s Ngram Viewer shows minimal use of the verb in any form until the late 20th century, then there’s a significant rise for the four past-tense forms, with greenlit and green-lit in particular ascendancy (click pics to embiggen).

More-reliable corpus data underscores this trend: greenlit/green-lit is 2–3 times as frequent as greenlighted/green-lighted in Mark Davies’s largest language corpora: the News on the Web (NOW) corpus (18 billion words) and the more informal iWeb corpus (14 billion):

(I’m ignoring a few false positives.)

The pattern is more pronounced in film and TV scripts. The Movie Corpus has 24 greenlit (6) or green-lit (18), 3 greenlighted (1) or green-lighted (2), while the TV Corpus has 82 greenlit (32) or green-lit (50), 8 greenlighted (1) or green-lighted (7).

Those ratios are top-heavy because many of the greenlit/green-lit uses – almost half in the TV Corpus – are criminal/prison slang referring to a punishment killing. Many of these are from Law & Order or The Shield, one episode of which was titled ‘Greenlit’:

One phone call from me and you’re greenlit.

Greenlit?

It’s an American prison term. It means you’ll be shanked in the shower . . .

Emilio Rivera and Michael Chiklis in the ‘Greenlit’ episode (2003) of The Shield

I mentioned that the verb remains fairly restricted, domain-wise. A genre search in COCA (1 billion words) – caveated for low frequency – shows a preponderance in magazines (mainly film and tech), with news and blogs also prominent.

Here’s greenlit:

green-lit (the examples in fiction are nearly all literal, referring to physical green light):

greenlighted:

and green-lighted:

The right-hand sections show the word’s rise in recent years in American English, a trend confirmed (with the exception of green-lighted) outside of US usage by data in the much larger NOW corpus.

greenlit:

green-lit:

greenlighted:

and green-lighted:

I compared use across countries, but nothing stood out, and the low numbers were skewed by false positives.

Origins

The verb greenlight comes from the noun phrase green light, whose use was originally literal. The OED dates the noun to 1839, in the amply titled The Roads and Railroads, Vehicles, and Modes of Travelling, of Ancient and Modern Countries; with Accounts of Bridges, Tunnels, and Canals, in Various Parts of the World, which says:

A green light should be placed at each station at the spot where the engine-man should slacken his speed, and a red light at the point where he is to stop.

Figurative use developed a century or so later, as in Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Feudal Spirit: ‘Carry on, old sport. You have the green light.’ It’s now a well established idiom in business, especially the film and TV industry, where it refers to authorization from a studio’s financial people to begin production on a project – hence Project Greenlight.

The verb greenlight emerged already figurative (and hyphenated) soon after the figurative noun. The OED dates it to 1941 in the Hutchinson News-Herald of Kansas:

The House Military Committee green-lighted legislation to give FDR broad authority to prevent work stoppages in defense plants.

The literal sense of green light remains widespread, often referring to road traffic lights. Red light and yellow/amber light have followed green light into metaphorical use. Curiously, a white light was originally the signal to proceed, but green soon supplanted it.

Irregularity

Irregular verbs are a pretty closed class, though a few anomalies, like knelt, have snuck in in modern times. Except for the highest-frequency ones, irregular verbs tend to become regular over time – especially in globalized and standardized use. Some forms, like holp (helped) and clumb (climbed), survive only in regional dialects.

When an irregular (or ‘strong’) verb becomes part of a compound, the rules for inflecting it typically carry across: sit → sat, thus babysit → babysat; write → wrote, thus ghostwrite → ghostwrote. The same applies when prefixing: hold → held, thus withhold → withheld; see → saw, thus foresee → foresaw.

But inflection sometimes yields instead to the regularizing impulse. ‘According to an unwritten rule,’ says the Economist, ‘when a new verb is coined from a noun, it is always regular’ – so we say grandstanded, not *grandstood, and highlighted, not *highlit. But that ‘always’ is overburdened, as we’ll see.

First, it’s instructive to see what happened to other compound verbs with –light. Backlighted and floodlighted prevailed for a few decades in the 20thC before backlit and floodlit superseded them. Dictionaries list both spellings for each. Crosslight is an uncommon verb, but crosslighted and crosslit are both used.

Gaslight is an unusual case. Gaslit has had the edge for the last two centuries, but gaslighted never went away and has rallied in recent years, thanks to the popularity of its figurative use:

gaslit in NOW, 2010–2023:

gaslighted in NOW, 2010–2023:

The Economist writer believes that gaslit is erroneously formed because it violates the unwritten rule: that because gaslight comes from the name of a play and its film adaptations, it is not a ‘true compound’ of light and so does not inherit its irregularity:

The same applies in the case of “to greenlight”. It does not mean to bathe in green light. It is a verb formed from the noun phrase “the green light”, a metaphorical approval given to something. Under the logic described above, “green-lit” should never have been greenlighted.

But English never met a ‘logical’ rule it didn’t soon scorn. And the Economist, for all its prescriptive lament, acknowledges that usage is a higher authority than etymology.

Whenever a new compound emerges or becomes popular, different forces, habits, intuitions, and analogies bear upon its grammar, and when these are in conflict, we find variation – across dialects, communities, and time periods. It can take a while for things to settle into established patterns.

Usage can also diverge semantically, with different verb forms attaching to different meanings or contexts: hanged (for people) and hung (for objects) is a familiar example. Some such divergence may develop with green-light, given its literal and figurative uses.

A choice

If you’re wondering whether to use greenlit, greenlighted, or a hyphenated form, and you don’t have a definite preference, bear in mind that figurative green-lighted will probably keep falling behind its snappier relation. As Merriam-Webster notes:

Green-lighted is swiftly losing ground to greenlit, its sleek hyphenless cousin. This should not really surprise anyone when we consider the fate of the word’s second element. When was the last time you lighted a candle or a match?

The Chicago Manual of Style editors defer to Merriam-Webster and advise on the question of hyphens:

If you’re comfortable getting ahead of recent trends, you could greenlight “greenlit.” If you’re not ready for that, retain the hyphens in the verb forms (“green-light,” “green-lit”).

People will rationalize it one way or another, before or after choosing. You may favour green-lighted because it comes from the noun. You may prefer the analogy with lit. You may switch depending on syntax – whether it’s functioning as a preterite, a past participle, or a participial adjective.

Or you can go with your gut, your ear, or plain old mouthfeel, keeping in mind that you might feel differently in the future.

It’s not a word I’ve use much, certainly not in writing, until today (and here it’s been nearly all mention, not use). But I’ve said greenlit more than greenlighted. Euphony and instinct probably informed the choice.

Given CMoS’s diffidence and the popularity of all four forms, you needn’t feel you have to adopt a particular one, unless you write it regularly in a professional context. For now, they’re all greenlighted. And greenlit.

Update:

Reader ktschwarz has reminded me of a great post by Mark Liberman at Language Log on the ‘systematic irregularization’ of terms like greenlight and the baseball phrase fly out. ‘Sometimes, a morphologically-irregular word form becomes regularized when the word is used in a new way,’ he writes, but there is ‘controversy over what the conditions are for this to happen’.

Describing a semantic model of the phenomenon, Yasuhiro Shirai argues that ‘speakers avoid irregular forms simply because they do not want to convey the meanings associated with those forms’. This model, Liberman says,

predicts that in a context where the “extended” sense of a verb becomes commoner, and thus a priori more likely, the irregular past tense should also become commoner, since its use is less likely to cause misunderstanding. That’s exactly the pattern that we see in the case of greenlit/greenlighted – the irregular form greenlit is widely used in the entertainment industry, where getting or not getting green-lighted is a ubiquitous concern.

‘Whether the true account of the facts is syntactic or semantic,’ Liberman concludes, ‘it needs to deal with the fact that “systematic regularization” is in fact rather patchy. And Hollywood’s embrace of “greenlit” over “greenlighted” is just another patch in the quilt.’

And here’s a follow-up to the current post, by Mark Liberman at Language Log, where commenters report their own intuitions about greenlit/greenlighted and related irregulars.