Forestry

How to spell forestry

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce forestry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does forestry mean?

1. nounThe science and practice of planting, managing, and harvesting forests and their resources.

Forestry in a sentence

• She studied forestry at university before joining the timber board.

• The agency oversees forestry across thousands of hectares of public land.

Where does forestry come from?

Language of origin: French

The word forestry is built on forest, which English took from Old French forest in the 1300s. That Old French word descends from the Medieval Latin phrase forestis silva, meaning roughly 'the outside wood', the woodland that lay beyond the fenced or cultivated land and was often set aside as a royal hunting reserve. The Latin element forestis is generally linked to foris, meaning 'outside' or 'out of doors', which is also the source of words like 'foreign'. The activity-naming suffix -ry, the same ending found in 'carpentry' and 'chemistry', was attached to give forestry, a term that became common in English in the 1800s as the scientific management of woodland grew into a profession. The spelling trap sits in the middle: writers must keep the silent-sounding e of forest before adding -ry, since the e from 'forest' is preserved rather than dropped.

How the word is built

• forest (wooded land)
• -ry (noun suffix denoting a practice or activity)