forest

Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word forest. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word forest, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say forest in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word forest you have here. The definition of the word forest will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition offorest, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
See also: Forest

English

English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia
the forest as seen from Namdapha

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Middle English forest, from Old French forest, from Early Medieval Latin forestis, likely from Frankish or Proto-West Germanic *furhisti (“forest, fir-grove, wooded land”); related to Old English fyrhþe (“forested land”), Old High German forst, forsti (“forest”), Old Norse fýri (“pine forest”). Doublet of frith.

In this sense, mostly displaced the native Middle English wode, from Old English wudu (modern English wood) and Middle English wold, wald, wæld, from Old English weald (modern English wold, weald).

Pronunciation

Noun

forest (countable and uncountable, plural forests)

  2. A dense uncultivated tract of trees and undergrowth, larger than woods.
    • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto VI”, in The Faerie Queene. , London: [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 3, page 76:
      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.
    • 2013 June 29, “Unspontaneous combustion”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8842, page 29:
      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 cheapest way to clear logged woodland is to burn it, producing an acrid cloud of foul white smoke that, carried by the wind, can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles.
  3. Any dense collection or amount.
    a forest of criticism
    • 1998, Katharine Payne, Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants, page 59:
      Squealing and still propelled by the kick, the calf scrabbled through the forest of legs and into the open.
  4. (historical) A defined area of land set aside in England as royal hunting ground or for other privileged use; all such areas.
    • 2006, Edwin Black, chapter 2, in Internal Combustion‎:
      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 the forest, dodged fines for forest offenses and stole from the rich to give to the poor. But his appeal was painfully real and embodied the struggle over wood.
    • 2013, Alexander Tulloch, The Little Book of Lancashire, The History Press, →ISBN:
      […] 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.
  5. (graph theory) A graph with no cycles; i.e., a graph made up of trees.
    • 2000, Victor N. Kasyanov, Vladimir A. Evstigneev, Graph Theory for Programmers: Algorithms for Processing Trees, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 16:
      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 GH and the set of inverse edges that do not belong to this forest.
  6. (computing, Microsoft Windows) A group of domains that are managed as a unit.
    • 2008, Laura E. Hunter, Robbie Allen, Active Directory Cookbook, O'Reilly Media, Inc., →ISBN, page 17:
      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 not have any access to it whatsoever, you need to implement a separate forest instead of using an additional domain within the current forest.
  7. (uncountable) The color forest green.

Hyponyms

Meronyms

Derived terms

Translations

See also

Verb

forest (third-person singular simple present forests, present participle foresting, simple past and past participle forested)

  1. (transitive) To cover an area with trees.
    • 1937, Széchenyi Scientific Society, Report on the Work of the Széchenyi Scientific Society: Founded for the Promotion of Research in Natural Sciences in Hungary, Zeéchenyi Scientific Society, page 83:
      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 Plains.

Translations

See also

Anagrams

Middle English

Alternative forms

Etymology

Borrowed from Old French forest, from Early Medieval Latin forestis.

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /fɔˈrɛst/, /ˈfɔrɛst/

Noun

forest (plural forestes)

  1. A forest or wood (uninhabited forested region)
  2. A preserve for hunting exclusive to royalty.

Descendants

  • English: forest
  • Scots: forest
  • → Welsh: fforest

References

Middle French

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Old French forest.

Pronunciation

This entry needs pronunciation information. If you are familiar with the IPA then please add some!

Noun

forest f (plural forests)

  1. forest
    • 1544, L’Arcadie-Trad-Massin, Paris:
      Mais quand il eut mis fin a ses parolles, & que semblablement les forestz resonnãtes se furent appaisées […]
      But when he had finished talking, and the forests felt appeased

Descendants

Further reading

Old Catalan

Etymology

Inherited from Early Medieval Latin forestis.

Noun

forest f

  1. forest

References

  • “forest” in Diccionari català-valencià-balear, Antoni Maria Alcover and Francesc de Borja Moll, 1962.

Old French

Alternative forms

Etymology

Inherited from Early Medieval Latin forestis/-a.

Pronunciation

  • (classical) IPA(key): /fuˈɾɛst/
  • (late) IPA(key): /fuˈɾɛːt/

Noun

forest oblique singular, m or f (oblique plural forez or foretz, nominative singular forez or foretz, nominative plural forest)

  1. royal hunting ground
  2. forest

Descendants

References

Wikious
Boobota
Sagapedia