Jungle

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈd͡ʒʌŋ.ɡ(ə)l/

Definitions

1. A dense tropical forest with thick vegetation, tangled vines, and diverse wildlife in hot, humid climates
2. A thick, overgrown tropical woodland characterized by impenetrable vegetation, moisture-rich air, and abundant wild animals in equatorial regions
3. A humid forest ecosystem dominated by dense undergrowth, intertwining plants, and diverse fauna native to warm climates

Etymology: In Sanskrit, the ancestor of English's lushest word meant desert. "Jaṅgala" described arid, sterile country: dry, rough, open ground, a wild place where little grew. Classical Sanskrit lexicographers glossed it with words for "arid" and "wild." The image it called up was scrub and baked earth, not dripping green canopy. Even the Sanskrit word may not have been native. It seems to have been absorbed from one of the older languages of the subcontinent, a substrate spoken before or alongside Indo-Aryan, possibly Dravidian or Munda, though no one has pinned down which. From Sanskrit it passed into Sauraseni Prakrit as "jaṃgala" and then into Hindustani, the language of north Indian streets and markets, as "jaṅgal," written जंगल in Hindi and جَن٘گَل in Urdu. Along the way the meaning loosened. In everyday Hindustani, "jaṅgal" came to mean any land that was not farmed or settled: wasteland, uncultivated ground, scrub, thicket, forest. The common thread was no longer dryness but wildness, the absence of human order. A dense tangle of trees qualified just as well as a dusty plain. That broad, practical sense is what the British in Bengal picked up in the eighteenth century. In the 1760s Major James Rennell, surveying the rivers of Bengal, was already noting riverbanks covered with it in his journals. One of the earliest printed English uses came in 1776, in Nathaniel Brassey Halhed's "A Code of Gentoo Laws," a translation commissioned under Warren Hastings of a digest of Hindu law compiled by Indian pandits. The word belonged at first to the working vocabulary of East India Company officials, surveyors and soldiers, part of the Anglo-Indian speech that the great glossary "Hobson-Jobson" would later catalogue. By 1873 the scholar Fitz-Edward Hall could write that "Jungle, derived to us, through the living language of India, from the Sanskrit, may now be regarded as good English." English then narrowed the meaning to the very thing the Sanskrit had not described. Of all the senses "jaṅgal" offered, English seized on the most dramatic, and the word came to mean dense, tangled, steaming tropical forest. Some writers have treated this change as a historical misunderstanding. But the drift from barren land to wild land had already happened in India. English simply finished the journey, carrying the word from one end of the landscape to the other. From there, the image of impenetrable, lawless growth bred metaphors. Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" (1894) made "the law of the jungle" a byword. In 1906 Upton Sinclair titled his exposé of the Chicago stockyards "The Jungle," turning a city of slaughterhouses into a wilderness of its own.

Synonyms: forest, rainforest, thicket, woodland, bush

Antonyms: desert, tundra, plain, savanna, meadow