Chartreuse

I decided to find out how this color earned its name. The answer, as it turns out, is provided in its definition: chartreuse is "a pale yellow or green colour resembling the liqueur chartreuse" (The Oxford Dictionary of English). The liqueur itself was "invented in 1605 and still made by the Carthusian monks" and accordingly was "named for the great charterhouse (la grande Chartreuse) which is the mother house of the order, near Grenoble in southern France" (A Dictionary of Food and Nutrition). So, the mother house of a religious order lent its name to a liqueur created by some of its monks, which in turn lent its name to any color resembling the drink.