Selvatic

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Describing plants or animals that live or grow in woods and open country rather than under human care ; rough, untamed and not shaped by cultivation
2. Referring to organisms found naturally in forests or wild places instead of being raised by people ; characterizing a landscape or manner that is rude, rugged and unrefined
3. Living in a natural state within woodland or untamed country, away from human cultivation ; having a coarse, uncivilized quality that suggests the wilderness

Etymology: "Selvatic" is an older spelling of "sylvatic", and both come from Latin "silvaticus", meaning "of the woods", which is built from "silva", "wood" or "forest". The Latin word is also the source of "sylvan", so this adjective is a close relative of that more familiar term for woodland scenes. The surprise lies in its doublet, "savage". The two words descend from the same Latin adjective but reached English by different routes, one through the learned channel that gave us "sylvan" and "sylvatic" and the other through the everyday speech of the Romance-speaking world. Over the centuries "savage" drifted from the sense of "of the wild wood" toward "uncultivated" and then "fierce," so a word once applied to forest creatures ended up describing human cruelty. "Sylvatic" kept its original sense of "wild" or "living in the woods." It is now used mainly in biology and medicine, for instance of animals or diseases that live in wild populations without humans.

Synonyms: wild, savage, feral

Antonyms: tame, domestic, cultivated