Cypress

How to spell cypress

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cypress

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cypress mean?

1. nounA tall evergreen coniferous tree with dark, dense foliage and small rounded cones, often planted in gardens and cemeteries.

Cypress in a sentence

• A row of tall cypress trees lined the gravel driveway.

• The carpenter chose cypress for the fence because the wood resists rot.

Where does cypress come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word names a family of evergreen conifers and traces back to the Greek kyparissos, the ancient name for the tree itself. The Greek word was probably borrowed from an older Mediterranean language, since the tree has grown around that region since antiquity, which is why its true ultimate source is not certain. Latin took it as cyparissus and later cypressus, and from there it passed into Old French as cipres before reaching English in the 1300s. Greek myth attached the tree to mourning through the story of a youth named Kyparissos who was turned into a cypress while grieving, and the tree has stood in graveyards ever since. The spelling trap is the unstressed second syllable, which sounds like a plain schwa but is written 'press' (not 'pres' or 'prus'), and the whole word is easily muddled with the island nation Cyprus.

How the word is built

• cypress (a single root from Greek kyparissos, the name of the tree); no separable prefix or suffix