Edder

Part of speech: noun, verb

Definitions

1. A barrier made of branches woven together between upright stakes, used as a hedge ; to weave cut branches together so they form a living fence
2. A dense fence formed by plaiting the stems of shrubs and saplings ; to twist and interlace branches in order to make such a hedge
3. A woven hedge built from pliant twigs and boughs laid through upright posts ; to intertwine the stems of young trees so they knit into a barrier

Etymology: Before the word meant a woven hedge, "edder" meant the hedge itself, a plain fence or border. Old English "eder" and "edor" carried that sense, and they descend from a Proto-Germanic root meaning "hedge" or "border," which also gave Old High German "etar." The Middle English forms "edre" and "eder" kept the same meaning through the medieval period. The sense narrowed over time. A hedge made by bending and interlacing living branches, rather than simply planting a row of shrubs, came to be called an edder, and the word is now used mainly for that technique. It is the same word as "adder" in one of its older spellings, a variant that reached English through the loss of an initial "a" in phrases where the article ran into the noun.