fir

UK/fɜː/US/fɝ/

nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,024 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: firs

A fir is a tall straight evergreen, the usual Christmas tree. A Douglas fir, a fir cone, a plantation of firs.

The cones stand upright on the branch and fall apart on the tree rather than dropping whole, which is how a botanist tells a fir from a spruce. The needles are soft and flat, and a fir holds them longer indoors, which is why it costs more.

fir — Lestat (Jan Mehlich) · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of fir

1nounfirA tall straight evergreen, the usual Christmas tree.B1+
“The mountainside was covered in dark firs, and snow lay thick on their branches.”

fir is a tree.

Where it comes from

Old English furh, from a Germanic root. German Fohre is the same word.

Middle English
firre
English, today
fir

Built from

furhwudu · Old English — pinewood
*pérkʷus · Proto-Indo-European — oak
fýriskógr · Old Norse — pine-wood
porca · Italian — fir

From Middle English firre. From Middle English firre, from Old English fyrh, furh, as in furhwudu (“pinewood”), from Proto-West Germanic furhu, from Proto-Germanic furhō, furhijǭ, from Proto-Indo-European pŕ̥kʷeh₂, from pérkʷus (“oak”). Possibly conflated during Middle English with Old Norse fýri (as in fýriskógr (“pine-wood”). Germanic cognates include Dutch vuren, Low German Fuhr, German Föhre (“pine”), Danish fyr). Outside of Germanic, compare Italian - (Trentino) porca (“fir”), Latin quercus (“oak”), Albanian shpardh, shparr (“Italian oak”), pa ਪਰਗਾਇ (“holm oak, Quercus baloot”)). Related to frith.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Trees & Flowers

Practise this word

fir in the wild

The Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) is a conifer species in the pine family, Pinaceae.
Douglas fir
There are three varieties: coast Douglas-fir, Rocky Mountain Douglas-fir and Mexican Douglas-fir.
Douglas fir
The wood of firs is used for pulp to make paper, for plywood, and for indoor construction.
Fir
In vernacular use, it is most often known as Cunninghamia, but is also sometimes called "China-fir" (though it is not a fir).
Cunninghamia
There are two varieties, the taller coast grand fir, found west of the Cascade Mountains, and the shorter interior grand fir, found east of the Cascades.
Abies grandis

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

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fir