Beech

How to spell beech

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce beech

What does beech mean?

1. nounA large deciduous tree with smooth grey bark, glossy leaves, and small edible nuts, or the pale hard timber it produces.

Beech in a sentence

• The old beech in the garden dropped its nuts across the lawn each autumn.

• The carpenter chose beech for the kitchen worktop because the grain is so pale and even.

Where does beech come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Beech comes from the Old English bēce, the name for the smooth-barked forest tree, which traces back to a Proto-Germanic root shared with the Dutch beuk and the German Buche. The same ancient root also gives us the German Buch and the English word 'book', because early Germanic peoples are thought to have cut runes into thin beech tablets, so the tree's name and the idea of written records grew from the same source. The word has meant this particular tree continuously for well over a thousand years, with the spelling settling on the double 'e' and final 'ch'. That ending is exactly what separates it from its identical-sounding partner 'beach', the stretch of sand, which has a completely different French-derived history. Keeping the tree's 'ee' in mind, linked to the 'ee' in 'tree', is a reliable way to remember which spelling means the timber.

How the word is built

• beech (from Old English bēce: the beech tree); a single root word with no affixes

Words that sound like beech

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• beach: A stretch of sand or pebbles along the edge of the sea, a lake, or a river.