Note: The print MED, along with most editors of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, favored a Scandinavian etymology for this famous phrase, citing the northern English and Scots adverb 'enkerly' (which is, however, never used in conjunction with color terms and seems rather a vague intensive). The print MED said: "Cp. Old Icelandic einkar-fagr 'very fair.' Gollancz (1940) and Davis (1967) both attempted to combine the Scandinavian with the French explanation, rejecting a purely French origin chiefly on the grounds that the French evidence points to a 'dark', but the English to a 'bright' green. But given the difficulties of equating color terms (the French seems to point more to a 'double-dyed' or rich green than to a 'dark green' per se), and the popularity of comparable French phrases, this seems unnecessary. See AND s.v. encre (s.xii1/3) (vrr. enca; enke, enque; enkre; henke ), "ink"; in compound 'encre vert', "ink-green, bright green" (with two 12th-century examples from Anglo-Norman lapidaries). The more common phrase reverses the order to 'vert encre' in which the second element is often taken to be a participial adjective 'inked green'. See DMF, s.v. ENCRE, subst. fém., "Préparation liquide colorée, servant à écrire, à dessiner, encre"; [in phrase 'vert encre'] : "Teinture, substance colorante utilisée pour teindre les tissus" [or] "Tissu de cette teinture". For further examples, including borrowings into Latin, and more fully developed arguments along the same lines, see Ross Arthur, "Enker (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 150 and 2477), " Notes and Queries (2024).