woods
See also: Woods
English
Pronunciation
Noun
woods
- plural of wood
- (usually in the plural, sometimes in the singular) A dense collection of trees covering a relatively small area; smaller than a forest.
- Woods are lovely, dark places.
- These woods are near a field.
- This woods is near a field. (uncommon)
- 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
- Woods more often takes a plural verb (determiner, etc, as in these woods are) than a singular verb (as in this woods is).[1]
- In English, one does not say "I was lost in the wood," but rather "I was lost in the woods."
Hyponyms
- See also Thesaurus:forest
Derived terms
Translations
forest — see forest
Verb
woods
- third-person singular simple present indicative of wood
References
- ^ 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".