beech
pronunciation
How to pronounce beech in British English:
UK [bi:tʃ]
How to pronounce beech in American English:
US [bitʃ]
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- Noun:
- any of several large deciduous trees with rounded spreading crowns and smooth gray bark and small sweet edible triangular nuts enclosed in burs; north temperate regions
- wood of any of various beech trees; used for flooring and containers and plywood and tool handles
Word Origin
- beech
- beech: [OE] Like many other tree-names, beech goes back a long way into the past, and is not always what it seems. Among early relatives Latin fāgus meant ‘beech’ (whence the tree’s modern scientific name), but Greek phāgós, for example, referred to an ‘edible oak’. Both come from a hypothetical Indo-European *bhagos, which may be related to Greek phagein ‘eat’ (which enters into a number of English compounds, such as phagocyte [19], literally ‘eating-cell’, geophagy [19], ‘earth-eating’, and sarcophagus).If this is so, the name may signify etymologically ‘edible tree’, with reference to its nuts, ‘beech mast’. The Old English word bēce’s immediate source was Germanic *bōkjōn, but this was a derivative; the main form bōkō produced words for ‘beech’ in other Germanic languages, such as German buche and Dutch beuk, and it survives in English as the first element of buckwheat [16], so named from its three-sided seeds which look like beech nuts.It is thought that book may come ultimately from bōk- ‘beech’, on the grounds that early runic inscriptions were carved on beechwood tablets.=> book, buckwheat, phagocyte, sarcophagus
- beech (n.)
- Old English bece "beech," from Proto-Germanic *bokjon (cognates: Old Norse bok, Dutch beuk, Flemish boek, Old High German buohha, German Buche, Middle Dutch boeke "beech"), from PIE root *bhagos "beech tree" (cognate with Greek phegos "oak," Latin fagus "beech;" see fagus). Formerly with adjectival form beechen. Also see book (n.).
Example
- 1. The junction between elm street and beech street was an accident black spot .
- 2. The rotting beech and oak trunks have become seedbeds for foxgloves and brambles .
- 3. Southern beech , rimu and kahikatea ( both tall conifers ) once covered more than 80 percent of new zealand , but the lowland forests are now less extensive .
- 4. If someone in this forest had been watching her-a man with a gun , for instance , hiding inside a copse of leafy beech trees-he would have noticed how quickly she moved up the path and how direly she scowled at the ground ahead of her feet .
- 5. As they explain in a paper in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences , the newly described species , named saccharomyces eubayanus , lives in galls that infect beech trees there .