forest

A dense uncultivated tract of trees and undergrowth, larger than woods.

Noun

  1. A dense uncultivated tract of trees and undergrowth, larger than woods.
    • Who after Archimagoes fowle defeat / Led her away into a foreſt wilde, / And turning wrathfull fyre to luſtfull heat, / With beaſtly ſin though her to haue defilde, / And made the vaſſal of his pleaſures vilde. - 1590,...
    • Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations, “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia. The...
  2. Any dense collection or amount.
    • a forest of criticism
    • Squealing and still propelled by the kick, the calf scrabbled through the forest of legs and into the open. - 1998, Katharine Payne, Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants, page 59:
  3. A defined area of land set aside in England as royal hunting ground or for other privileged use; all such areas.
    • Throughout the 1500s, the populace roiled over a constellation of grievances of which the forest emerged as a key focal point. The popular late Middle Ages fictional character Robin Hood, dressed in green to symbolize...
    • […] in places such as the Forest of Bowland there is hardly a tree in sight and much of the area is a vast tract of almost barren gritstone hills and peat moorland. - 2013, Alexander Tulloch, The Little Book of...
  4. A graph with no cycles; i.e., a graph made up of trees.
    • Let H be a traversal of an undirected graph G = (X, U). For given H, the set U can be split into set of tree edges from the forest G_H and the set of inverse edges that do not belong to this forest. - 2000, Victor N....
  5. A group of domains that are managed as a unit.
    • Forests are considered the security boundary in Active Directory; by this we mean that if you need to definitively restrict access to a resource within a particular domain so that administrators from other domains do...
  6. The color forest green.

Origin

Inherited from Middle English forest, from Old French forest, from Early Medieval Latin forestis. The Latin could be: * from foris (“outside”), as in forestis (silva) "(wood) outside," * or from Frankish or Proto-West Germanic *furhisti (“forest, fir-grove, wooded land”), equivalent to fir + hurst. In which case, related to Old English fyrhþe (“forested land”), Old High German forst, forsti (“forest”), Old Norse fýri (“pine forest”). Doublet of frith. Cognate with Dutch vorst (“copse, grove, woodland”), German Forst (“forest”). In this sense, mostly displaced the native Middle English wode, from Old English wudu (modern English wood) and Middle English wald, wold, wæld, from Old English wald, weald (modern English wald, weald, wold).

Forms

forests foreste

Synonyms

forest woods woodland

Hyponyms

backwoods boscage bosk bosque brake cloud forest coppice copse cover covert frith gallery forest greenwood grove growth hammock holt hurst jungle thicket old-growth forest primeval forest rainforest ruffmans

Related

timber arboretum orchard pinetum stand

Derived

African forest elephant agriforest agroforest amber forest cockroach Ardenne Forest Ardennes Forest Back Forest bastion forest Bauple Forest Beech Forest Bellmount Forest Black Forest black forest black forest cake Bohemian Forest Bondi Forest Bowland Forest High Bowland Forest Low Bowmans Forest Bracknell Forest Bulga Forest Bulwell Forest Campbells Forest can't see the forest for the trees

Verb

  1. To cover an area with trees.
    • From the view-point of national economy professor Fehér communicates to us most interesting facts, which he has established in an important question now of actuality : in the subject of foresting the Great Hungarian...

Forms

forests foresting forested foreste

Related

afforest reforest bush firth grove holt hurst jungle shaw thicket tree wald weald wold wood woodland woods