Wood

How to spell wood

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wood

What does wood mean?

1. nounThe hard fibrous material that forms the trunk and branches of a tree, used as timber or fuel.
2. nounAn area of land covered with growing trees, smaller than a forest.

Wood in a sentence

• The old table was carved from a single piece of wood.

• A narrow path led through the wood to the river.

• They stacked dry wood beside the stove for the winter.

• Deer often graze at the edge of the wood at dusk.

Where does wood come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word, descending from the Old English wudu, an earlier form widu, which meant both 'a tree' and 'a forest' as well as the hard substance cut from trees. It traces back through the Proto-Germanic widu- and is related to forms in other old Germanic and Celtic tongues, where similar words named trees and woodland. Over the centuries the spelling settled from widu to wode and then to the modern wood, while the vowel shortened to the clipped sound heard today. The two main senses, the growing trees of a wood and the cut timber of a plank, have travelled together since the very beginning. Its short, simple shape is exactly why it is so easily swapped in writing with its homophone 'would', which has an entirely separate origin in the verb 'will'.

How the word is built

• wood (from Old English wudu: tree, forest, timber); single root, no affixes

Words that sound like wood

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• would: A modal verb used to express a wish, a polite request, a hypothetical situation, or habitual past action.