arboreal
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /ɑɹˈbɔɹi.əl/
ipa: /ɑːˈbɔːɹɪ.əl/
rhymes: -ɔːɹiəl
Etymology: From Latin arboreus (“tree-like”) + -al, mid-17th century.
Senses: examples: text: 1650, Walter Charleton (translator), “Of the Magnetick Cure of Wounds” in A Ternary of Paradoxes, by Jan Baptist van Helmont, London: William Lee, p. 72,
High and sacred, in good troth, is the power of the microcosmical spirit, which without any arboreal trunck produceth a true Cherry:
text: The sleek Brazilian jaguar
Does not in its arboreal gloom
Distil so rank a feline smell
As Grishkin in a drawing-room.
ref: 1919, T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality”, in Selected Poems, Penguin, published 1948:
text: In the mild breezes of the west and of the east lofty trees wave in different directions their first class foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which that region is thoroughly well supplied.
ref: 1922, James Joyce, Ulysses, London: The Egoist Press, page 282:
text: Only short blocks away traffic flowed turbulently on Flatbush Avenue […] but here the arboreal green and the pollen-hazy light, the infrequent trucks and cars, the casual pace of the few strollers at the park’s border all created the effect of an outlying area in a modest Southern city […]
ref: 1979, William Styron, chapter 2, in Sophie’s Choice, New York: Random House, page 37:
text: No trees have grown on the windswept Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean for tens of thousands of years — just shrubs and other low-lying vegetation. That’s why a recent arboreal discovery nearly 20 feet (6 meters) beneath the ground caught researchers’ attention.
ref: 2024 September 27, Katie Hunt, “Scientists discover hidden ancient forest on treeless island”, in CNN:
glosses: Of, relating to, or resembling a tree.
examples: text: If the harvest mouse had been more strictly arboreal, it would perhaps have had its tail rendered structurally prehensile, as is the case with some members of the same order.
ref: 1872, Charles Darwin, chapter 7, in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th edition, London: Odhams Press, page 233:
text: An arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical trees.
ref: 1911, Ambrose Bierce, “monkey”, in The Devil’s Dictionary, New York, N.Y.; Washington, D.C.: The Neale Publishing Company, →OCLC:
text: […] faced with this emergency, Tessie took Chapter Eleven and me up to the attic. Maybe it was a vestige of our arboreal past; we wanted to climb up and out of danger.
ref: 2002, Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Book 3, p. 239:
text: Typically, tarantulas are either terrestrial or arboreal, but the Chilobrachys natanicharum can live in both enivronments^([sic]), the researchers said, demonstrating its adaptability.
ref: 2023 September 26, Hafsa Khalil, “Electric blue tarantula species discovered in Thailand”, in CNN:
glosses: Living in or among trees.
examples: text: The breadth of the arboreal landscape requires a longer list of living creatures, and creatures of greater bulk.
ref: 1885, Richard Jefferies, “Forest”, in The Open Air,, London: Chatto and Windus, page 188:
text: She married him, and the two of them settled down in this quiet, arboreal part of Kensington:
ref: 1945, Elizabeth Bowen, “The Demon Lover”, in The Demon Lover and Other Stories,, London: Jonathan Cape, page 96:
text: mountains, unlike the arboreal garden and the sacred stream, had gone unmentioned in the account of Creation given in Genesis
ref: 1995, Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, New York: Knopf, Part 3, Chapter 7, p. 426:
synonyms: arboreous
glosses: Covered or filled with trees.
Derived terms: arborealism
arborealist
arboreality
arboreally
Monte Cristo arboreal alligator lizard
nonarboreal
semiarboreal
subarboreal
Related terms: arbor
arborescent
arboreous
arborous
boreal
dendritic
sylvan