# forest
## English
### Alternative forms

* foreste (obsolete)

### Etymology

Inherited 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

* (Received Pronunciation) enPR: fŏr′ĭst, IPA: /ˈfɒɹɪst/
** Audio (Received Pronunciation):(file)
* (General American) enPR: fôr′ĭst, fŏr′ĭst, fôrst, IPA: /ˈfɔɹəst/, /fɔɹst/
** Audio (General American):(file)
** Audio (California); [ˈfɔɹ.ɛ̈stʰ]:(file)
* (New York City, Philadelphia) IPA: /ˈfɑɹɪst/, /ˈfɑɹəst/
* Homophone: forced (US, sometimes especially in fast speech)
* Rhymes: -ɒɹɪst
* Hyphenation: for‧est

### Noun

forest (countable and uncountable, plural forests)
* 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.
* 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.
* (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.
* (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 G$_H$ and the set of inverse edges that do not belong to this forest.
* (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.
* (uncountable) The color forest green.

#### Hyponyms

* See also Thesaurus:forest

#### Meronyms

* tree
* See also Thesaurus:forest

#### Derived terms

* African forest elephant
* agriforest
* agroforest
* amber forest cockroach
* bastion forest
* Beech Forest
* black forest
* Black Forest
* black forest cake
* Bohemian Forest
* Bowland Forest High
* Bowland Forest Low
* Bracknell Forest
* Bulwell Forest
* can't see the forest for the trees
* cloud forest
* cryptoforest
* Dartmoor Forest
* disforest
* drift of the forest
* enforest
* Epping Forest
* Far Forest
* Finnish forest reindeer
* flame-of-the-forest
* flame of the forest
* Flodge
* fog forest
* forestage
* forestal
* forestation
* forest batis
* forest-bill
* forest-blue
* forest-born
* forest caterpillar hunter
* Forest City
* Forest County
* forest court
* forestcraft
* forested
* forester
* forest falcon
* forest fire
* forest fly
* forest fruits
* forestful
* Forest Gate
* forest giraffe
* forest glass
* Forest Glen
* forest green tree frog
* Forest Hall
* Forest Head
* Forest Heath
* Forest Hill, Foresthill
* forestial
* forestification
* forestine
* forestish
* forestkeeper
* forestland
* forestless
* forestlike
* forest machine
* forest mahogany
* forestness
* forest oak
* forestocracy
* Forest of Dean
* forestology
* Forest Park
* forest plot
* forest product
* forest puff adder
* forest puppy
* forest ranger
* forest robin
* Forest Row
* forestry
* forestscape
* forest school
* forest star
* forest starwort
* forest steppe
* forestward
* forestwards
* forest whites
* forestwide
* foresty
* fresh fucked fox in a forest fire
* Gaboon forest frog
* gallery forest
* ghost forest
* giant forest genet
* giant forest hog
* Gisburn Forest
* hidden forest chipmunk
* hyperforest
* interforest
* intraforest
* kelp forest
* king of the forest
* Kyasanur forest disease
* Lyman-alpha forest
* miss the forest for the trees
* monsoon forest
* multiforest
* nanoforest
* New Forest
* nonforest
* Norwegian forest cat
* Oak Forest
* old-growth forest
* palaeoforest
* paleoforest
* Park Forest
* Peak Forest
* primary forest
* primeval forest
* pseudoforest
* rain forest
* rainforest
* random forest
* red forest
* secondary forest
* second-growth forest
* see the forest but for the trees
* see the forest for the trees
* see the forest through the trees
* see the trees through the forest
* Sherwood Forest
* silent forest syndrome
* spoligoforest
* Stockton on the Forest
* subforest
* Teutoburg Forest
* thorn forest
* unforest
* virgin forest
* Waltham Forest
* Wyre Forest
* Yatir Forest

#### See also

* Category:forest on Wikimedia Commons.Wikimedia Commons

### Verb

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

#### Related terms

* afforest
* reforest

#### See also

* bush
* deforest
* holt
* jungle
* weald
* wood
* woodland
* woods

### Anagrams

* Forets, Fortes, Foster, fetors, forset, fortes, fortés, foster, froste, softer

## Middle English
### Alternative forms

* fforest, foreste

### Etymology

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

### Pronunciation

* IPA: /fɔˈrɛst/, /ˈfɔrɛst/

### Noun

forest (plural forestes)
* A forest or wood (uninhabited forested region)
** c. 1335-1361, William of Palerne (MS. King's College 13), folio 4, recto, lines 3-4; republished as W. W. Skeat, editor, The Romance of William of Palerne‎, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1867, →OCLC, page 6:Hit bi fel in þat foreſt · þere faſt by ſide / þer woned a wel old cherl · þat was a couherdeIt so happened that right there in that forest / there was a very old peasant; a cowherd.
* A preserve for hunting exclusive to royalty.

#### Related terms

* forester

#### Descendants

* English: forest
* Scots: forest
* → Welsh: fforest

#### References

* “forest, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 2018-10-17.

## Middle French
### Alternative forms

* fourest

### 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)
* 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

* French: forêt

### Further reading

* “forest”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

## Old Catalan
### Etymology

Inherited from Early Medieval Latin forestis.

### Noun

forest f
* forest

### References

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

## Old French
### Alternative forms

* foreste

### Etymology

Inherited from Early Medieval Latin forestis/-a.

### Pronunciation

* (Classical) IPA: /fuˈɾɛst/
* (Late) IPA: /fuˈɾɛːt/

### Noun

forest oblique singular, m or f (oblique plural forez or foretz, nominative singular forez or foretz, nominative plural forest)
* royal hunting ground
* forest

#### Descendants

* Franc-Comtois: fouré (Poisoux)
* Middle French: forest, fourest
** French: forêt
* Gallo: forée (Nantais), forést
* Lorrain: [Term?] (/⁠forɛ⁠/) (St-Maurice-sur-Moselle)
* Norman: forêt (Cotentinais, Jersiais), foiret (Brayon), fouorêt (Guernesiais)
* Picard: foreû (Athois)
* Poitevin-Saintongeais: fouras (Châtellerault), fourêt (Saintongeais)
* → Middle English: forest, fforest, foreste
** English: forest
** Scots: forest
** → Welsh: fforest
* → Middle Irish: foraís
** Irish: foraois

### References

* “forest”, in DEAF: Dictionnaire Étymologique de l'Ancien Français, Heidelberg: Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1968-.