Rainforest

How to spell rainforest

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce rainforest

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rainforest mean?

1. nounA dense forest in a region of consistently high rainfall, typically tropical and rich in plant and animal life.

Rainforest in a sentence

• The documentary followed researchers deep into the Amazon rainforest.

• Logging continues to shrink the tropical rainforest each year.

Where does rainforest come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound of two much older words. The first element, 'rain', descends from Old English 'regn', a native Germanic word for falling water that has close cousins in Dutch 'regen' and German 'Regen'. The second element, 'forest', arrived in English in the 1200s through Old French 'forest', which came from the Latin phrase 'forestis silva', meaning the 'outside wood', that is, the unenclosed woodland lying beyond the cultivated and fenced land. The combined term 'rainforest' is comparatively modern: it was coined in the early twentieth century as a direct translation of the German 'Regenwald', a term the botanist Andreas Schimper used in 1898 to describe dense, perpetually wet tropical woodland. Because it is simply rain plus forest joined together, the only spelling point to remember is that it is written as one solid word, with no space and no hidden letters.

How the word is built

• rain (water falling from clouds)
• forest (large area of trees)