Other forms: woods
Wood is the hard material that trees are made of. Grain, knots, and the smell of it when it is cut.
As a material it is a mass noun, so you buy wood rather than woods, and the building trade calls it timber or lumber. The plural has a separate meaning, since a wood is a small forest and the woods is where you go walking. The word gives English one very useful idiom about perspective, since not seeing the wood for the trees means losing the whole in the detail.
1nounwoodThe hard material forming the trunk and branches of trees.~67%
“The handle is carved from a single piece of wood.”
2nounsmallA small forest.~33%
“There is a bluebell wood behind the church.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: timber
Old English wudu meant the forest and the material at once, and English still uses one word for both. A wood is the trees; wood is what the trees are made of.
Middle English
wode
English, today
wood
Built from
From Middle English wode. From Middle English wode, from Old English wudu, widu (“wood, forest, grove; tree; timber”), from Proto-West Germanic widu, from Proto-Germanic widuz (“wood”), from Proto-Indo-European h₁weydʰh₁- (“to separate”). The spelling developed as it did in wool. Cognate with Dutch wede (“wood, twig”), Middle High German wite (“wood”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish ved (“wood”), ovd wið (“wood, timber”), Faroese and Icelandic viður (“wood”), Norwegian Nynorsk ved (“wood, firewood”), vid (“wide, broad”). Further cognates include Irish fiodh (“a wood, tree”), Old Irish fid (“tree”) and Welsh gwŷdd (“trees”), from Proto-Celtic widus (“wood”). Unrelated to Dutch woud (“forest”), German Wald (“forest”) (see English wold).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA