birch
pronunciation
How to pronounce birch in British English:
UK [bɜ:tʃ]
How to pronounce birch in American English:
US [bɜrtʃ]
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- Noun:
- hard close-grained wood of any of various birch trees; used especially in furniture and interior finishes and plywood
- any betulaceous tree or shrub of the genus Betula having a thin peeling bark
- bundle of birch twigs used to hit people as punishment
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- Verb:
- whip with a birch twig
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- Adjective:
- consisting of or made of wood of the birch tree
Word Origin
- birch
- birch: [OE] Old English bi(e)rce came from a prehistoric Germanic *berkjōn, source also of German birke. The word goes back ultimately to an Indo-European *bhergo, but as is often the case with ancient tree-names, it does not denote the same type of tree in every language in which it has descendants: Latin fraxinus, for example, means ‘ash tree’. It has been speculated that the word is related to bright (whose Indo-European source was *bhereg-), with reference to the tree’s light-coloured bark.It could also be that the word bark [13] itself is related. The verb birch ‘flog’ (originally with a birch rod or bunch of birch twigs) is early 19th-century.=> bark, bright
- birch (n.)
- Old English berc, beorc (also the name of the rune for "b"), from Proto-Germanic *berkjon (cognates: Old Saxon birka, Old Norse börk, Danish birk, Swedish björk, Middle Dutch berke, Dutch berk, Old High German birihha, German Birke), from PIE *bhergo (cognates: Ossetian barz, Old Church Slavonic breza, Russian bereza, Lithuanian beržas, Sanskrit bhurjah, Latin farnus, fraxinus "mountain ash"), from root *bhereg- "to gleam, white." Meaning "bunch of birch twigs used for flogging" (1640s) led to verb meaning "to flog" (1830). Related: Birched; birching. Birch beer is by 1827, American English.
Example
- 1. To see how much less land birch would have covered , they used elephants as a proxy .
- 2. To get to birch creek , you go to the end of our street where you hit sixteenth avenue .
- 3. Built near a ski resort in the helags and skars mountains , this restaurant is constructed of local birch logs .
- 4. Flaxseed , birch brooms , maple sugar , goose
- 5. Dr field 's team set about the task by analysing ancient records of birch pollen preserved in lake sediments from known mammoth breeding grounds like siberia .