As far as I can tell from Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B7%91#Japanese), though I don't speak Japanese, the Japanese word midori has had the meaning "bud" or "sprout", but the Chinese words written with the same character don't. Spelling and word identity are distinct. This confuses me sometimes when looking up Japanese words.
1. If "midori" began with the meaning "sprout", then...
2. its spelling in early texts should have been 芽 [sprout] and not 綠 [green].
The spellings were fixed a long time before the article identifies the change as taking place.
The Japanese spelling of a word must develop by either (1) the Japanese borrowing a Chinese word with the meaning of the Japanese word; (2) option #1, but the Japanese meaning of the word later shifts; (3) option #1, but the Japanese spelling of the word later shifts [this would be weird]; (4) indigenous innovation of a character; or (5) refusal to use a character at all.
"Midori" appears to have begun its life by being spelled as if it meant "green" and to have continued to mean "green" since that time. This is strange if it originally meant "sprout", and I'd like to know more about the claim and the history.
Ah, I see, I misread your comment quite badly. I don't have any references to look this up in, but perhaps the ancestor of the word midori is first attested in a syllabic spelling in Old Japanese with only the meaning "sprout", and when it came to be spelled logographically as 綠, it was mainly used with the meaning "green". But the question could be asked in the Tea Room of Wiktionary, where it would probably find its way to someone more knowledgeable than me.
