Wold, Wood, Woodland, Woodlot: Origins, Forms, Histories of Words Meaning Wooded Area

The natural features of a region are its topography (Greek topos, "place").

One important kind of topographic feature is wooded areas. 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 wold, wood, woodland, and woodlot.

Wold
Modern English wold comes from Middle English wold (13th century) and wald (13th century), from Old English wald (before 12th century) and weald (before 12th century). The word is akin to Old High German wald ("forest") and Old Norse vollr ("field").

From the 8th century to the 13th century in England, the sole or primary meaning of wold was a forest or wooded upland. That sense of the word continued to be used through the 15th century, after which the woodland meaning of the word became obsolete.

Beginning in the early 16th century, wold had very little general use. Instead, it passed (in a process that had started in the 13th century or even earlier) into local use to designate various nonwooded or sparsely wooded areas that were probably at one time thickly wooded (according to the Oxford English Dictionary).

Those tracts of land fall into two main types: an upland area of open country, that is, a plain; and a hilly or rolling region. In both types, the word wold became permanently established in place-names. Famous examples include The Wolds, a highland plain district in northeast England comprising the Yorkshire Wolds and the Lincoln Wolds; and the Cotswold Hills or the Cotswolds, a range of hills in southwest central England.

Wood
Modern English wood comes from Middle English wood (15th century) and wode (13th century), from Old English widu and wudu (both before 12th century). The word is akin to Old High German witu ("wood") and Old Irish fid ("tree").

The original, now obsolete, meaning of wood is a tree (8th century).

A dense growth of trees, usually regarded as larger than a copse but smaller than a forest, is a wood (9th century). The term usually refers to naturally growing trees rather than planted trees (which are often called a grove or a plantation). Wood is often used in the plural with either singular or plural construction.

The ground on which such trees grow is itself a wood (9th century).

The hard substance that makes up most of the roots, stems, and branches of trees beneath the bark is, of course, also wood (9th century).

Woodland
The historical forms of woodland parallel those of wood itself (see wood above), such as Middle English wodeland and Old English wudulond.

Woodland denotes land covered with woody vegetation, especially trees, or more generally a wooded region (9th century).

Woodlot
A restricted area of woodland usually privately maintained as a source of fuel and lumber is a woodlot (1643). The term is used mainly in the United States.
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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.