Birch

How to spell birch

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce birch

What does birch mean?

1. nounA slender deciduous tree with thin, peeling, often pale bark and small leaves.

Birch in a sentence

• A tall birch stood at the edge of the garden, its bark peeling in white strips.

• The carpenter chose birch for the kitchen cabinets because the grain was so pale and even.

Where does birch come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Birch is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English birce (also recorded as beorc), the name of the slender, pale-barked tree. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close cousins such as German Birke and Dutch berk, and it reaches back to a Proto-Indo-European root that meant something like 'white' or 'shining', almost certainly a reference to the tree's distinctive bright, papery bark. The same ancient root is thought to lie behind the Sanskrit word bhurja, another name for the birch. Because young, flexible birch twigs were once bundled and used to flog wrongdoers, the noun gave rise to a verb meaning 'to beat with such a rod', a sense common in old school and court records. The spelling is straightforward once you remember it ends in the soft 'ch', much like the related words 'church' and 'lurch', rather than any silent or doubled letter.

How the word is built

• birch (single native root, from Old English birce, beorc: the birch tree)