Chicken or egg

I have always been fascinated by the so-called interdefinability sets which you find in dictionaries

(1) (a) „Green is the colour of grass”
(b) „Grass is a green plant”

(2) (a) „Red is the colour of blood”
(b) „Blood is a red liquid”

These are vicious circles found in real-life dictionaries. Teachers, especially logicians hate vicious circles, although many of them seem to think that everything must be defined, which leads to vicious circles, because you cannot define everything ad infinitum.
It looks as if vicious circles are quite ordinary. This may be an insult to those philosophers and linguists who think that all meaning should be derived from a final set of primitive concepts (lingua mentalis – Leibniz, Wierzbicka).
But it never occured to me until now that an intedefinability set can encapsulate a big part of the history of philosophy, namely the dispute between empiricists like Hume and Platonists.
Hume believed that all ideas came from experience. So he would think that we first see a green object like grass (impression) and then derive the concept of green from it (idea).
Plato might think that the concept of green is innate. When we see some object in the world we compare it with our set of innate features (like greenness) and define GRASS.
Make sense? There is no escaping from philosophy, even when compiling a dictionary.