woods
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See also: Woods
English[edit]
Pronunciation[edit]
Noun[edit]
woods
Noun[edit]
woods pl
- (usually with plural construction, sometimes with singular construction) A dense collection of trees, usually one covering a relatively small area; usually smaller than a forest.
- These woods are part of the Campbell property.
- This woods is part of the Campbell property. (uncommon)
- 1923, Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening:
- The woods are lovely, dark and deep
- 1939, C. R. Tillotson, The Care and Improvement of the Farm Woods (Farmers' Bulletin No. 1177)[1], page 18:
- Where protection is not considered essential, the logical places for establishing a woods are on those portions of the farm which have steep slopes […] .
- 2009, James Preston Hardison, Miracles on the Poke-A-No[2], page 159:
- Night after night, we both had similar dreams that our daughter was wandering around in a woods.
- 2013, Robert McGowan, Current: Essays on the Passing of Time in the Woods[3], page 20:
- It is a crop, like a crop of corn, which differs from a natural field of grasses in the way that a crop of trees differs from a woods.
- (military, attributive) For chemical behavior purposes, trees in full leaf (coniferous or medium-dense deciduous forests).
Usage notes[edit]
- The word woods in the sense of a woodland more often takes a plural verb or determiner (as in these woods are) than a singular verb or determiner (as in this woods is).[1]
- In some varieties of English, only the plurale tantum form of the word is used in the sense of a woodland; thus, one does not say "I was lost in the wood" but rather "I was lost in the woods," and one does not speak of going from this wood to that wood but rather from these woods to those woods.
Hyponyms[edit]
- See also Thesaurus:forest
Derived terms[edit]
Translations[edit]
forest — see forest
Verb[edit]
woods
- third-person singular simple present indicative of wood
References[edit]
- ^ Ngram Viewer finds "this woods is" to have been about 1/50th as common as "these woods are" since the 1960s, and historically rarer. Compare "a woods is", 1/150th as common as "the woods are".