Shaw, Shrubbery, Silva, Spinney, Thicket: Origins, Forms, Histories of Words Meaning Woodland

The natural features of a region are its topography (Greek topos, "place"). One important kind of topographic feature is woodland. Woods of various kinds and sizes, as well as related natural and human-made features, have many different names.

In the current alphabetic series of such terms, here are the origins, forms, and histories of shaw, shrubbery, silva, spinney, and thicket.

Shaw
Modern English shaw comes from Middle English shaw (15th century) and shawe (13th century), from Old English scaga (before 12th century) and sceaga (before 12th century). The word is akin to Old Norse skegg ("beard"), skagi ("promontory"), and skaga ("to project").

A shaw is a thicket, a small wood, or a grove, especially a strip of woods forming the boundary of a field (8th century). The word is now dialectal.

Shrubbery
Shrubbery evolved in the 18th century from shrub plus the suffix -ery ("collection, aggregate"). Shrub (16th century) itself comes from Middle English schrobbe (14th century), from Old English scrybb (before 12th century). The word is akin to Norwegian skrubbebaer ("a small species of dogwood").

A shrub is a woody plant smaller than a tree. A planting of shrubs (1748) or a growth of shrubs in a mass (1777) is shrubbery.

Silva
Silva entered English in the 19th century from Latin silva ("wood, forest, grove"). Selva (Spanish and Portuguese) and sylva (Latin) are variant forms.

The forest trees of a region or country are its silva (c. 1848).

Spinney
Modern English spinney (17th century) comes from the earlier spelling spinnie (16th century), from Middle French espinaye ("thorny thicket"), from espine ("thorn"), from Latin spina ("thorn").

Spinney is a British word meaning a small clump of trees or a small wood with undergrowth, especially one planted or preserved for sheltering game birds (1597).

Thicket
Modern English thicket comes from (assumed) Middle English thikket, from Old English thiccet (before 12th century). The Old English noun is formed from the Old English adjective thicce ("thick") plus the diminutive suffix -et.

A dense growth of shrubbery or small trees, or a place where such bushes and low trees grow thickly together, is a thicket (before 1000).
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Encyclopaedia Britannica Ready Reference 2004. CD-ROM. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2004.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. 11th ed. Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 2006.

Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary. 3rd ed. Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 2007.

The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1989.