forests

Noun

forest (countable and uncountable, plural forests)

1. 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
2. Any dense collection or amount.
   • a forest of criticism
3. (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
4. 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
5. (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
6. (uncountable) The color forest green.

See all 15 meanings of forest