Poplar

How to spell poplar

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce poplar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does poplar mean?

1. nounA tall, fast-growing tree with soft wood and leaves that flutter in the wind.

Poplar in a sentence

• A row of poplar trees lined the edge of the field.

• The furniture was made from lightweight poplar timber.

Where does poplar come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word goes back to the Latin populus, which was the name of the poplar tree. It travelled into English through Old French, where the tree was called poplier (later peuplier), and English adopted it during the 1300s as 'popler' before the spelling settled on 'poplar'. A neat coincidence sits at the root: Latin populus also meant 'the people', the source of words like 'popular' and 'population', though the two senses were always kept apart by the Romans, who marked the tree with a long vowel. That hidden link is exactly why poplar and popular sound identical and trip writers up. The poplar was prized for its tall, fast-growing timber, and the spelling with the bare -ar ending, rather than the -ular of popular, is the trap to watch.

How the word is built

• popl- (from Latin populus, the poplar tree)
• -ar (forming a tree name)