Hickery

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A wooded area or plantation made up mainly of hickory trees, the nut-bearing hardwoods of North America
2. A stand of hickory trees growing together, often valued for their tough wood and edible nuts
3. An area of land thick with hickory trees, the tall American hardwoods that bear edible nuts

Etymology: The tree's name began as a Powhatan word, and English spent almost two centuries reshaping it. In 1608 colonists in Virginia recorded the Powhatan term "pawcohiccora," which named the nut-bearing trees and the oil pressed from their nuts. English speakers then turned it into "pockerchicory" and "pokickery" in the 1610s and 1630s, and by 1671 they had settled on "hickery," the form this word takes here. That spelling was not the end of the change. "Hiccory" appeared around 1705, and only in 1792 did "hickory" become standard, so the English form of the name kept shifting for nearly 200 years after the first recording. "Hickery," in the sense of a grove of these trees, is simply the older, obsolete spelling of the tree's name, preserved from the period when the word was still settling into English.

Synonyms: hickory