Word.ws English Dictionary

greenhushing

greenhushing noun: a tendency of a company’s marketing to be quiet about its sustainability efforts so as to avoid attention from the political extremes, whether greener-than-thou anti-greenwashing crusaders or browner-than-thou anti-wokeness crusaders.

Noun

greenhushing (uncountable)

  1. A tendency of a company’s marketing to be quiet about its sustainability efforts so as to avoid attention from the political extremes, whether greener-than-thou anti-greenwashing crusaders or browner-than-thou anti-wokeness crusaders.
    • So-called greenhushing, where corporations downplay their climate efforts, has spread in the US and Europe as ESG strategies fall out of fashion. Some companies are talking less about environmental and social goals in an effort to avoid accusations of greenwashing, while also dodging political...
    • “The problem with greenhushing or transition-hushing is that it doesn’t help the financial system mobilize capital,” Oi-Yee Choo, the exchange’s chief executive officer, told the Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit in Singapore on Tuesday.2025 July 29, Ishika Mookerjee, David Stringer, “Greenhushing Can Keep Costs Higher, Climate Impact X CEO Says”, in Bloomberg, archived from the original on 29 Jul 2025

Origin of greenhushing

Blend of greenwashing + hushing. Coined by American brand strategist Jerry Stifelman in a blog for the consulting agency TreeHugger published the 2nd of March 2008.

Questions about greenhushing

What does greenhushing mean?
Greenhushing means a tendency of a company’s marketing to be quiet about its sustainability efforts so as to avoid attention from the political extremes, whether greener-than-thou anti-greenwashing crusaders or browner-than-thou anti-wokeness crusaders.
What part of speech is greenhushing?
Greenhushing is a noun.

Words near greenhushing in the dictionary

  1. greenhoused
  2. greenhouselike
  3. greenhouses
  4. greenhousing
  5. Greenhow
  6. greenhushing
  7. greeniac
  8. greeniacs
  9. Greenidge
  10. Greenidges
  11. greenie

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: greenhushing (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-greenhushing.wav.

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