Talk:wood

Forest vs wood

"Forest" is not synonymous with "wood". A forest covers a larger area than a wood. I have removed the synonym and put in a cross-reference to "forest". I will move the translations of "forest" (those that I recognise) to there in due course. — This unsigned comment was added by Paul G (talk • contribs) at 16:02, 17 December 2003 (UTC).

It is a near synonym. If I say: He walked into the forest; he walked into the wood. it means the same thing more or less. Leasnam 19:15, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Etymologies

The information under etymology 2 needs to moved under the sunder word wode. In the Middle English Dictionary, Wode is the headword and wood is a minor spelling variation. Wood and Wode have sunder etymologies and their spellings should stay asunder. AnWulf ... Ferþu Hal! 19:11, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

• But their spellings have not stayed "asunder". And ‘wood’ is the more common spelling in modern English citations. Ƿidsiþ 19:33, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

It's 2011 and I still almost never say I went hiking in the forest, rather I say I was in the woods, I was hiking in the wood, I like the trees in these woods.Acdcrocks 22:38, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

RFV discussion: January–August 2015

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wood

Rfv-sense: Made of or with wood

Just attributive use of the noun? — Ungoliant ^(falai) 20:25, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure how to tell the difference between an uncountable noun and an incomparable adjective. None of the tests at Wiktionary:English adjectives seem to be capable of distinguishing between these two. So what kind of citation would (hypothetically) be able to demonstrate that "wood" is indeed an incomparable adjective as well as a noun? —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 20:46, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Predicative use, i.e. you can say “this toy is wooden”, but can you say “this toy is wood”? — Ungoliant ^(falai) 20:49, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

I'd still say that's use of the uncountable noun. Talk:woodland might provide a way forward; very wood and quite wood can't be interpreted as nominal uses, unless I'm missing something. Renard Migrant (talk) 20:56, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

That's true, but I wouldn't expect to find uses of an incomparable adjective with "quite" and "very". —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 21:08, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Yes, you can. [1] [2] [3] [4] But it's not completely obvious to me whether these are predicative uses of an adjective or an uncountable noun. But if you think they're good enough, I'll add them to the entry. —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 20:59, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Dubious IMO. It feels like "this music is (genre)": more of a noun usage. Equinox ◑ 21:01, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

@Mr. Granger: I'd apply Occam's razor. If we have a noun entry for a word then there should be some unambiguous evidence for its adjectivity to support an Adjective PoS section. I can find three cites (1, 3 & 4) ["be|am|is|are|be|being|was|were more wood than" -"there is|was more wood than" here] at Google Books for the following collocation: "[be] more wood (than)". If upheld, that would let us keep the Adjective section. DCDuring TALK 22:19, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Saying "it's more wood than metal" doesn't make it an adjective, though. —CodeCat 22:21, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

I tend to see "this table is wood" as an adjectival usage. Dictionaries having this adjectival sense at "wood" include AHD[5] and Merriam-Webster (entry 3)[6]. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:32, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

For the record, now as before, I consider this use of RFV less than fortunate, since for English there are no conclusive purely evidence-based criteria for adjectivity. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:34, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

The OED has only the obsolete adjective (our etymology 2) meaning mad. Are we being wooden about this? We do have steel as an adjective, and the OED doesn't, but why don't we have soap and cardboard as adjectives? (Later note: we do now for cardboard, with good cites. Thanks, Mr. Granger.) Dbfirs 17:03, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

@Dan Polansky: In most cases the evidence is extremely clear. Evidence is to be preferred to gum-flapping wherever possible. We can reduce the gum-flapping to evaluation and weighing of evidence, in this case, that of the judgment of lexicographers and the corpus data. It is very hard for me to take as meaningful an individual vote which often represents nothing more than an idiolect or a completely uninformed opinion. And articulate arguments based on agreed-to principles have become scarcer over time. DCDuring TALK 17:24, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

I'd rather go by Merriam-Webster than OED. Merriam-Webster does have an adjective sense for "steel"[7]. We could have an adjective sense in cardboard, just like Merriam-Webster[8]; however, they may have the adjective sense to accompany the figurative adjective sense that they have. Again, since adjectivity is hard to detect based only on evidence, I discourage and oppose this use of RFV. Yes, there are cases where the evidence clearly supports adjectivity, but absence of such evidence requires judgment and discussion to determine the adjectivity, as per the existence of incomparable adjectives. Under the assumption that we take this RFV seriously, occurrences of "this table is wood" should count toward attestation as adjective, IMHO. This RFV should be closed as out-of-scope (my preferable closure), or as passed. We have no evidence to tell us whether "this table is wood" is an adjectival use, so we do have to use judgment or linguistic sense; hence the propriety of RFD for these kind of cases. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:10, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

RFV can be useful and appropriate in such cases, since the POS is part of the sense, and it seems perfectly acceptable to challenge whether there's usage for the sense as an adjective. The problem comes when the evidence is inconclusive: the presumption with rfd is for keeping unless the case is made for deletion, while with rfv it's for deletion unless the case (in the form of citations) is made for keeping. I have no problem with using rfv- unless someone tries to close it as failed when citations have been provided, but they're ambiguous.Chuck Entz (talk) 00:06, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

You ignored the incomparable adjectives objection, it seems. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:11, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

As I understand it, the issue is that there are no circumstances in which an incomparable adjective could be expected to appear that a noun could not also appear. (For example, one doesn't find "wooder", "woodest", "very wood", "quite wood", etc, but one wouldn't expect to find "birchen-er", "birchenest", "very birchen", etc, either.)
What do other dictionaries think? Of the comprehensive dictionaries, Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com have an adjective section, while Century does not; of the less comprehensive dictionaries, Cambridge, MacMillan, Oxford Dictionaries and Collins do not have a relevant adjective section (some do cover the adjective "wode", but that's not what we're discussing).
We would not lose any information by lacking an adjective section — the noun section covers all affected usage (senses) nicely, and translations can go in wooden.
- -sche (discuss) 06:22, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

RFV-failed: not only do no citations show unambiguous adjectival usage (all can be analysed regularly as the noun), I can't even find evidence that this was an adjective in Old or Middle English, which distinguished nouns and adjectives in ways that can typically be recognized; the Middle English Dictionary treats attributive usage under the noun, with the preface "as quasi-adj.:". - -sche (discuss) 08:42, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Etymology

WOOD is derived from Middle English wode, from Old English wudu, due to the hybrid influence of a very rare Old English wiodu, being the only form cognate with Irish fiodh (“wood, timber”). Andrew H. Gray 09:20, 31 October 2017 (UTC) Changes made: Andrew H. Gray 10:30, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

08:23, 9 December 2017 (UTC)Andrew

I currently do not know where the dubious Indo-European supposed form UUDU originated, supposedly the origin of an identical form in Ogham Irish. This certainly needs reliable confirmation before the assumption that WUDU was assimilated later into Old English from that root. Andrew H. Gray 11:45, 21 May 2020 (UTC) Andrew

adjective

1. Made or consisting of wood; wooden.
2. Used or suitable for cutting, storing, or working with wood.
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=wood

--Backinstadiums (talk) 15:40, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Vulgarity

Why does every word have to have a vulgar reference? WIktionary is supposed to be about etymology. At no time in history has "wood" meant "erect penis".79.106.209.59 18:03, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Of course it has that meaning, e.g. morning wood. It's not our fault that humans enjoy inventing vulgar slang. We just document it. Equinox ◑ 18:12, 14 February 2022 (UTC)