Word.ws English Dictionary

forrest

forrest is the obsolete spelling of forest.

Meaning of forest

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

Proper noun capitalized: Forrest

Forrest

  1. A topographical surname from Middle English for someone who lived or worked in a Royal forest (area of woodland reserved for hunting).
    • Whether it is the soul food restaurant on 38th Street, where he and his father and trainer, Jack Mosley, dined earlier in the week, or at the workouts leading up Saturday's WBC welterweight championship rematch against Vernon Forrest at Conseco Fieldhouse, Mosley cannot go anywhere without hearing...2002 July 19, Damon Hack, “Boxing: Despite Not Having the Title, Mosley Garners Attention”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 06 Jan 2021, retrieved 06 Jan 2014
    • Forrest later attacked Willis in New York, knocking him to the ground; lawsuits proliferated as Willis sued Forrest for assault, and Forrest countersued for libel.2014, Eric L. Haralson, Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, page 497
  2. A male given name transferred from the surname.
  3. A town in the Shire of Colac Otway, south western Victoria, Australia

Forms of forrest

pluralforrests

Origin of forrest

English surname, from the noun forest. Also adopted and translated from the word for "forest" in various other languages by settlers.

Words formed from forrest

Phrases with forrest

Questions about forrest

What does forrest mean?
Forrest means a topographical surname from Middle English for someone who lived or worked in a Royal forest (area of woodland reserved for hunting).
What is forrest the obsolete spelling of?
Forrest is the obsolete spelling of forest.
What part of speech is forrest?
Forrest is a proper noun.

Words near forrest in the dictionary

  1. forreigne
  2. forren
  3. Forrer
  4. Forrers
  5. Forres
  6. forrest
  7. Forrest City
  8. Forrest County
  9. Forrest Gump
  10. Forrest Gumps
  11. Forrest Trump

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: forrest (page history and authors); Forrest (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.

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