Bush

How to spell bush

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bush

What does bush mean?

1. nounA woody plant smaller than a tree, with several stems growing from the base.
2. nounWild, uncultivated country far from towns, especially in Australia, Africa, or Canada.

Bush in a sentence

• She planted a rose bush beside the front gate.

• The family drove for hours through the bush before reaching the farm.

• The gardener trimmed every bush along the path.

• Rangers warned hikers not to wander off into the bush alone.

Where does bush come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Bush traces back to an old Germanic root meaning a shrub or clump of woody growth, which surfaces in Middle Dutch as 'bosch' and Old High German as 'busc'. English seems to have drawn on two streams at once: a native Old English form and a reinforcing borrowing through Old French 'bois' (wood) and Anglo-Norman usage, which is why the single short word covers both a small woody plant and, by extension, wild scrubby country. By the medieval period an innkeeper would hang a literal bush of ivy or greenery outside a tavern as a sign, giving rise to the old saying that good wine needs no bush. Colonists later carried the word to Africa, Australia, and Canada, where 'the bush' came to mean the vast uncleared backcountry far from town. The spelling is short and phonetically tidy, so the only real hazard is the unexpected 'u' that sounds like the vowel in 'put' rather than in 'cut'.

How the word is built

• bush (single root, from Germanic via Old French/Middle Dutch: a shrub or thicket)