Deforestation

How to spell deforestation

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce deforestation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does deforestation mean?

1. nounThe clearing or removal of trees and forests from an area of land.

Deforestation in a sentence

• The report linked widespread deforestation to falling rainfall in the region.

• Cattle ranching is a major driver of deforestation in the rainforest.

Where does deforestation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built from the verb 'deforest', which combines the Latin-derived prefix 'de-', meaning 'removal' or 'undoing', with 'forest'. The noun 'forest' came into English in the 1200s through Old French 'forest', which traces back to the Medieval Latin phrase 'forestis silva', literally 'the outside wood', meaning woodland that lay outside the enclosed and cultivated land and was often set aside for a king's hunting. The 'de-' prefix turns the idea around, so to 'deforest' is to strip an area of its trees. The abstract noun 'deforestation', formed with the Latin suffix '-ation' that names an action or its result, appears in English in the nineteenth century and grew common in environmental writing of the twentieth. The spelling is straightforward once you see the parts, but the long unstressed middle ('for-es-TA-tion') is where writers wobble, sometimes dropping the 'e' before the 's'.

How the word is built

• de- (removal, reversal)
• forest (wooded land)
• -ation (noun of action)