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foliage

UK/ˈfəʊliɪdʒ/US/ˈfoʊliɪd͡ʒ/
nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,398 of 15,258leans written

Foliage is the leaves of a plant taken all together. Dense foliage, autumn foliage, hide in the foliage.

It is a mass noun with no plural, and it means the leaves as a mass rather than any one of them. In America, going to look at autumn foliage is a whole seasonal industry, with forecasts published for when the colour will peak.

Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of foliage

  1. 1nounfoliageThe leaves of a plant taken all together.B2+

    “The thick foliage of the jungle hid the path from view.”

foliage is leaves.

Where it comes from

Middle French feuillage comes from feuille, a leaf, from Latin folium. The spelling was reshaped towards the Latin.

  1. Latin

    folium — leaf

  2. Middle French

    feuillage

  3. Middle English

    ffoylage

  4. English, today

    foliage

From earlier foilage, from Late Middle English ffoylage, from Middle French feuillage. The more recent form is influenced by Latin folium (“leaf”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Trees & Flowers

Practise this word

foliage in the wild

  • In botany, an evergreen is a plant which has foliage that remains green and functional throughout the year.

    Evergreen

  • Leaf peeping, fall color tourism, or simply fall tourism is the activity in which people travel to observe and photograph the fall foliage in autumn.

    Leaf peeping

  • The phenomenon is commonly called autumn colours or autumn foliage in British English and fall colors, fall foliage, or simply foliage in American English.

    Autumn leaf color

  • The Alagoas foliage-gleaner (Philydor novaesi) is an extinct passerine bird in the Furnariinae subfamily of the ovenbird family Furnariidae.

    Alagoas foliage-gleaner

  • TREES WHICH DO NOT LOSE THE WHOLE OF THEIR FOLIAGE.

    The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 3 (of 6)· Pliny the Elder

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.

Related words

the folium family

foliageexfoliate

foliage — used about once every 6,207 pages · #10,398 · point at the bar for the others