Firwode

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic term for a wood or grove made up chiefly of fir trees
2. Old-fashioned name for a stand of fir trees growing together as a forest
3. A now-obsolete word meaning a woodland planted or dominated by conifers of the fir kind

Etymology: A firwode was a grove or forest of fir trees, and it is a plain compound of "fir" and "wode," the Middle English form of "wood." Here "wode" means a wooded tract of land, not the material timber, so the word describes a place rather than a substance. The second element survives in the modern "wood" in the sense of woodland, as in "greenwood." Its first element is the tree name "fir," which English has used since Old English and which is probably of Germanic origin, though its exact ancestry is uncertain. The compound is transparent: a reader in the medieval period would have understood it at once from its two parts. It belongs to a group of English place-words built the same way, such as "oakwood" and "beechwood," which named a forest by the tree that grew in it.