Other forms: garlands
A garland is a ring or rope of flowers and leaves, made to be worn or hung up. The circle of jasmine dropped over a guest's neck at the airport in Chennai, the daisy chain a child threads in a park, the loops of greenery strung along a church rail at Christmas.
Garlands mark occasions: victory, weddings, funerals, festivals. In Greece and Rome the winner wore a garland of laurel, and the word still carries that air of honour — to garland someone is to hang flowers on them, and in writing, to heap praise on them. The verb also means plainly to decorate: a doorway garlanded with ivy. Keep it apart from wreath, the same shape but pulling towards funerals and front doors in December, and from bouquet, which you carry in your hand.
1noungarlandA ring or rope of flowers and leaves, worn or hung up as decoration.
“Each dancer wore a garland of marigolds around her neck.”
2verbdecorateTo decorate or crown someone or something with flowers.
“The bride was garlanded with white roses.”
3nounmarkA mark of honour or victory.
“The garland went to a poet nobody had heard of.”
garland is a decoration.
Behind garland stands a Frankish word *wiera, a gold thread, and the verb made from it, meaning to adorn or bedeck. Old French took the verb as garlande, and Middle English kept the shape almost unchanged. The same gold thread gives English wire — so a garland is, at root, something wound.
Frankish
*wierlōn
Old French
garlande
Middle English
garland
English, today
garland
Built from
From Middle English garland, garlaunde, gerland, from Old French garlande, garlaunde, gerlande, guerlande (compare French guirlande), from Frankish wierlōn, wieralōn, a frequentative form of Frankish wierōn (“to adorn, bedeck”), from wiera (“a gold thread”), from or related to Proto-Germanic wīraz. Akin to Old High German wieren (“to adorn”), Old High German wiara (“gold thread”). More at wire.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Weddings & Celebrations, A Song of Ice and Fire