Forest or Woods … What’s the Difference?
Where I grew up, a plot of timber-covered land out in back of a farmstead might be called “the woods,” but it probably wouldn’t be called a forest. That would be a bit too grandiose. So, is the difference really about size? It’s not quite as simple as that.
Let’s start with a little etymology for all you word-nerds out there, because history often provides useful context.
The word forest is Old French, and it probably came to English in the wake of the Norman conquest (1066 CE). But its deeper origin can be found in the Latin foris, which shares an Indo-European root with the word “door.” In Latin, foris came to mean something “beyond the door,” or outside.
As Kevin Stroud points out in his wonderful History of English Podcast, to understand forest it may be useful to view it alongside another French word that entered the English language around the same time — park. A park was originally a closed-off area for “beasts of the chase,” or a game preserve. The key feature of a park was that it was enclosed or somehow fenced in. A forest, by contrast, came to mean the wild area beyond the fence.
In England, the term forest acquired an even more specific legal meaning, as Norman rulers used it to designate royal hunting grounds. Land set aside as royal forests could not be used by anyone else for…
