forest

Syllables: for·est/ˈfɒɹɪst//ˈfɔɹəst/

forest noun: a dense uncultivated tract of trees and undergrowth, larger than woods.

Image: Yogeshw, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

forest (countable and uncountable, plural forests)

A dense uncultivated tract of trees and undergrowth, larger than woods.
- Who after Archimagoes fowle defeat / Led her away into a foreſt wilde, / And turning wrathfull fyre to luſtfull heat, / With beaſtly ſin though her to haue defilde, / And made the vaſſal of his pleaſures vilde.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto VI”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 3, page 76
- Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations, “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia. The cheapest way to clear logged woodland is to burn it, producing an acrid cloud of...2013 June 29, “Unspontaneous combustion”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8842, page 29
Any dense collection or amount.
- a forest of criticism
- Squealing and still propelled by the kick, the calf scrabbled through the forest of legs and into the open.1998, Katharine Payne, Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants, page 59
(historical) A defined area of land set aside in England as royal hunting ground or for other privileged use; all such areas.
- Throughout the 1500s, the populace roiled over a constellation of grievances of which the forest emerged as a key focal point. The popular late Middle Ages fictional character Robin Hood, dressed in green to symbolize the forest, dodged fines for forest offenses and stole from the rich to give to...2006, Edwin Black, chapter 2, in Internal Combustion
- […] in places such as the Forest of Bowland there is hardly a tree in sight and much of the area is a vast tract of almost barren gritstone hills and peat moorland.2013, Alexander Tulloch, The Little Book of Lancashire, The History Press, →ISBN
A graph with no cycles; i.e., a graph made up of trees.
- Let H be a traversal of an undirected graph G = (X, U). For given H, the set U can be split into set of tree edges from the forest G_H and the set of inverse edges that do not belong to this forest.2000, Victor N. Kasyanov, Vladimir A. Evstigneev, Graph Theory for Programmers: Algorithms for Processing Trees, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 16
(Microsoft Windows) A group of domains that are managed as a unit.
- Forests are considered the security boundary in Active Directory; by this we mean that if you need to definitively restrict access to a resource within a particular domain so that administrators from other domains do not have any access to it whatsoever, you need to implement a separate forest...2008, Laura E. Hunter, Robbie Allen, Active Directory Cookbook, O'Reilly Media, Inc., →ISBN, page 17
(uncountable) The color forest green.

Verb

forest (third-person singular simple present forests, present participle foresting, simple past and past participle forested)

(transitive) To cover an area with trees.
- From the view-point of national economy professor Fehér communicates to us most interesting facts, which he has established in an important question now of actuality : in the subject of foresting the Great Hungarian Plains.1937, Széchenyi Scientific Society, Report on the Work of the Széchenyi Scientific Society: Founded for the Promotion of Research in Natural Sciences in Hungary, Zeéchenyi Scientific Society, page 83

Proper noun capitalized: Forest

Forest (countable and uncountable, plural Forests)

A surname.
A city, the county seat of Scott County, Mississippi, United States.
A number of townships in the United States, in Indiana, Iowa, Michigan (3), Minnesota (2), and Missouri, listed under Forest Township.
A hamlet in Ellerton-on-Swale parish, North Yorkshire, England (OS grid ref NZ2700).
A locality in Circular Head Council, north western Tasmania, Australia.
A municipality of Brussels, Brussels Capital Region, Belgium

Synonyms:

Vorst
Nottingham Forest F.C.
A male given name: Alternative form of Forrest.

forest meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

forest in Hindi

dense collection of trees: जंगल jaṅgal, वन van

forest in Tamil

dense collection of trees: காடு kāṭu, வனம் vaṉam, அடவி aṭavi, கா kā, பொழில் poḻil, அரண் araṇ

forest in Marathi

dense collection of trees: जंगल jaṅgal, वन van

forest in Urdu

dense collection of trees: جَن٘گَل jaṅgal

More languagesFewer languages

forest in Bengali: বন bon, জঙ্গল joṅgol
forest in Telugu: అడవి aḍavi
forest in Malayalam: വനം vanaṁ, കാട് kāṭŭ
forest in Kannada: ಮಲೆ, ವನ vana, ಅರಣ್ಯ araṇya, ಕಾಡು kāḍu
forest in Punjabi: ਵਣ vaṇ
forest in Gujarati: જંગલ jaṅgal, વન van
forest in Odia: ବଣ baṇa
forest in Sanskrit: वन vana, अरण्य araṇya, अटवी aṭavī
forest in Sinhala: කැලය kælaya
forest in Assamese: হাবি habi, জংঘল zoṅghol
forest in Nepali: वन van, वनजङ्गल vanjaṅgal, जङ्गल jaṅgal
forest in Pashto: ځنګل jangal
forest in Tagalog: gubat
forest in Arabic: غَابَة ḡāba, غابة ḡāba, حرش ḥirš
forest in Malay: hutan
forest in Indonesian: hutan, pepohonan
forest in Persian: بیشَه bēša, جَنْگَل jangal, بیشِه biše, انبوه anbuh
forest in Thai: ป่า bpàa, ป่าไม้ bpàa-máai
forest in Vietnamese: rừng
forest in Myanmar: တော tau:, သစ်တော sactau:
Dhivehi: ވަލުތެރެ valutere, ޖަންގަލި jan̊gali

Examples of forest in a sentence

Before we knew it, the forest was on us, and the air grew colder and damper.
Soon we left the forest behind and we were out in open country.
After we left the forest, the country opened into a wide, flat plain.

All 40 example sentences with forest

Synonyms of forest

Forms of forest

Noun
plural	forests
alternative form (obsolete)	foreste
Verb
third-person singular present	forests
present participle	foresting
past participle	forested
past	forested
Proper noun
plural	Forests

Plural of forest: forests

Origin of forest

Inherited from Middle English forest, from Old French forest, from Early Medieval Latin forestis. The Latin could be: * from foris (“outside”), as in forestis (silva) "(wood) outside," * or from Frankish or Proto-West Germanic *furhisti (“forest, fir-grove, wooded land”), equivalent to fir + hurst. In which case, related to Old English fyrhþe (“forested land”), Old High German forst, forsti (“forest”), Old Norse fýri (“pine forest”). Doublet of frith. Cognate with Dutch vorst (“copse, grove, woodland”), German Forst (“forest”). In this sense, mostly displaced the native Middle English wode, from Old English wudu (modern English wood) and Middle English wald, wold, wæld, from Old English wald, weald (modern English wald, weald, wold).

French surname, from Old French forest (“forest”). Compare Laforest and Deforest. Also an English and Scottish surname, variant of Forrest and related to the above.

Words formed from forest

Phrases with forest

150 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with forest

Questions about forest

What does forest mean?: Forest means a dense uncultivated tract of trees and undergrowth, larger than woods.
What is forest in Hindi?: Forest in Hindi is जंगल (jaṅgal), वन (van). See Forest meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is forest?: Forest can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce forest?: Forest is pronounced /ˈfɒɹɪst/ (UK).
What is the plural of forest?: The plural of forest is forests.

Words near forest in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: forest (page history and authors); Forest (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-uk-forest.ogg, LL-Q1860 (eng)-Exilexi-forest.wav.

Cite this entry: “forest.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/forest. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.