hurst

From Middle English hirste (“wood, grove; hillock; sandbank, sandbar”), from Old English hyrst (“hillock, eminence, height, wood, wooded eminence”), from Proto-West Germanic *hursti; akin to Dutch horst (“thicket; bird's nest”), German Horst (“thicket, nest”).

• (General American) IPA^(key): /hɝst/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /hɜːst/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɜː(ɹ)st

hurst (plural hursts)

1. (rare outside place names) A wood or grove.
   • 1612, Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, song 2 p. 27:

     Where, to her neighboring Chase, the curteous Forrest show’d
     So just conceived joy, that from each rising a hurst,
     Where many a goodlie Oake had carefullie been nurst,

   • 1963, P M Hubbard, Flush as May, New York, N.Y.: London House & Maxwell, →LCCN, page 158:

     ‘How you grandiloquise. A forest of uncertainty. But there – I slow down, as you say. I hesitate. I wonder if – no , let’s try further down. I cannot see the hurst for the elms.’

   • 2000, Grazing Ecology and Forest History, →ISBN, page 150:

     A blackthorn seedling can in this way expand into a hurst of 0,1-0, 5 ha in the space of 10 years, […]

   • 2010, Adam Nicolson, Sissinghurst: A Castle's Unfinished History, page 124:

     A recognizable world seems to balloon up out of the names […] . Lovehurst down in the clay lands towards Staplehurst means "the hurst that was left to someone in a will": Legacy Wood. Its near neighbor, Tolehurst, originally called Tunlafahirst, means something like Heir's Farm Wood.

• Hurts, Stuhr, Thurs, hurts

• Audio:

  (file)

hurst

1. second-person singular present of huren

hurst

1. Alternative form of hirste