Woody

How to spell woody

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce woody

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does woody mean?

1. adjectiveMade of wood, or having the texture, stiffness, or aroma of wood.
2. adjectiveCovered with or full of trees; densely wooded.

Woody in a sentence

• The old plant stems had turned tough and woody.

• Their cottage sits at the edge of a quiet, woody valley.

• The wine had a rich, woody flavour from the oak barrel.

• The trail winds through a woody stretch before the open meadow.

Where does woody come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word, built from the Old English 'wudu', meaning the material timber and also a stand of growing trees, plus the everyday adjective ending '-y' that signals 'full of' or 'resembling'. The base 'wudu' goes back to a Germanic root shared with related words in Dutch and German, and it once carried the broader sense of a forest or wild grove as much as the cut material. The '-y' suffix is the same productive ending found in 'stony', 'leafy', and 'grassy', and it has been attaching to nouns since Old English to form adjectives. By the medieval period 'woody' was in regular use for places thick with trees, and later it extended to anything having the texture, smell, or stiffness of wood. The spelling is straightforward once you remember it simply joins 'wood' to '-y', though the doubled 'o' of the base often trips writers who expect a single vowel.

How the word is built

• wood (timber, from a tree)
• -y (adjective suffix: full of, resembling)