Inherited from Middle English forest, from Old French forest, from Early Medieval Latin forestis. The Latin could be: * from foris (“outside”), as in forestis (silva) "(wood) outside," * or from Frankish or Proto-West Germanic *furhisti (“forest, fir-grove, wooded land”), equivalent to fir + hurst. In which case, related to Old English fyrhþe (“forested land”), Old High German forst, forsti (“forest”), Old Norse fýri (“pine forest”). Doublet of frith. Cognate with Dutch vorst (“copse, grove, woodland”), German Forst (“forest”). In this sense, mostly displaced the native Middle English wode, from Old English wudu (modern English wood) and Middle English wald, wold, wæld, from Old English wald, weald (modern English wald, weald, wold).
1
A dense uncultivated tract of trees and undergrowth, larger than woods.
Who after Archimagoes fowle defeat / Led her away into a foreſt wilde, / And turning wrathfull fyre to luſtfull heat, / With beaſtly ſin though her to haue defilde, / And made the vaſſal of his pleaſures vilde.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto VI”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 3, page 76:
Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations, “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia. The cheapest way to clear logged woodland is to burn it, producing an acrid cloud of foul white smoke that, carried by the wind, can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles.2013 June 29, “Unspontaneous combustion”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8842, page 29:
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Any dense collection or amount.
a forest of criticism
Squealing and still propelled by the kick, the calf scrabbled through the forest of legs and into the open.1998, Katharine Payne, Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants, page 59:
3
Historical A defined area of land set aside in England as royal hunting ground or for other privileged use; all such areas.
Throughout the 1500s, the populace roiled over a constellation of grievances of which the forest emerged as a key focal point. The popular late Middle Ages fictional character Robin Hood, dressed in green to symbolize the forest, dodged fines for forest offenses and stole from the rich to give to the poor. But his appeal was painfully real and embodied the struggle over wood.2006, Edwin Black, chapter 2, in Internal Combustion:
[…] in places such as the Forest of Bowland there is hardly a tree in sight and much of the area is a vast tract of almost barren gritstone hills and peat moorland.2013, Alexander Tulloch, The Little Book of Lancashire, The History Press, →ISBN:
Let H be a traversal of an undirected graph G = (X, U). For given H, the set U can be split into set of tree edges from the forest G_H and the set of inverse edges that do not belong to this forest.2000, Victor N. Kasyanov, Vladimir A. Evstigneev, Graph Theory for Programmers: Algorithms for Processing Trees, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 16:
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Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences A group of domains that are managed as a unit.
Microsoft Windows
Forests are considered the security boundary in Active Directory; by this we mean that if you need to definitively restrict access to a resource within a particular domain so that administrators from other domains do not have any access to it whatsoever, you need to implement a separate forest instead of using an additional domain within the current forest.2008, Laura E. Hunter, Robbie Allen, Active Directory Cookbook, O'Reilly Media, Inc., →ISBN, page 17:
Inherited from Middle English forest, from Old French forest, from Early Medieval Latin forestis. The Latin could be: * from foris (“outside”), as in forestis (silva) "(wood) outside," * or from Frankish or Proto-West Germanic *furhisti (“forest, fir-grove, wooded land”), equivalent to fir + hurst. In which case, related to Old English fyrhþe (“forested land”), Old High German forst, forsti (“forest”), Old Norse fýri (“pine forest”). Doublet of frith. Cognate with Dutch vorst (“copse, grove, woodland”), German Forst (“forest”). In this sense, mostly displaced the native Middle English wode, from Old English wudu (modern English wood) and Middle English wald, wold, wæld, from Old English wald, weald (modern English wald, weald, wold).
1
To cover an area with trees.
From the view-point of national economy professor Fehér communicates to us most interesting facts, which he has established in an important question now of actuality : in the subject of foresting the Great Hungarian Plains.1937, Széchenyi Scientific Society, Report on the Work of the Széchenyi Scientific Society: Founded for the Promotion of Research in Natural Sciences in Hungary, Zeéchenyi Scientific Society, page 83