Woods

How to spell woods

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce woods

What does woods mean?

1. nounAn area of land covered with growing trees, smaller than a forest.

Woods in a sentence

• The children built a den in the woods behind the house.

• A narrow path wound through the dark woods toward the river.

Where does woods come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English wudu, earlier widu, which meant both a tree or timber and a larger growth of trees, that is a forest. It belongs to the Germanic family and has relatives in old Germanic tongues, though the deeper roots before that are uncertain. Over the centuries the single form 'wood' came to be used in the plural 'woods' to name a tract of land covered with growing trees, smaller than a true forest. The same wudu also gives us the everyday material sense of wood, the timber cut from trees, so a single short word does double duty for both the trees standing and the stuff they yield. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable, and the only mild trap is the double o, which represents the long vowel inherited from the Old English form.

How the word is built

• wood (Old English wudu: forest, tree)
• -s (plural)