• (RP) enPR: fŏr′ĭst, IPA: /ˈfɒɹɪst/
• (America) enPR fôr′ĭst, IPA: /ˈfɔɹɪst/, /ˈfɑɹɪst/, /fɔɹst/

forest (plural forests)

1. A dense uncultivated tract of trees and undergrowth, larger than woods.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Qveene. […], London: Printed [by John Wolfe] for VVilliam Ponsonbie, OCLC 960102938 ↗, book I, canto VI, stanza 3, page 76 ↗:

     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.

2. Any dense collection or amount.

   a forest of criticism

   • 1998, Katharine Payne, Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants (page 59)

     Squealing and still propelled by the kick, the calf scrabbled through the forest of legs and into the open.

3. (historical) A defined area of land set aside in England as royal hunting ground or for other privileged use; all such areas.
   • 2013, Alexander Tulloch, The Little Book of Lancashire, The History Press ISBN 9780752497464

     [...] 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.

4. (graph theory) A graph with no cycles; i.e., a graph made up of trees.
   • 2000, Victor N. Kasyanov, Vladimir A. Evstigneev, Graph Theory for Programmers: Algorithms for Processing Trees, Springer Science & Business Media (ISBN 9780792364283), page 16:

     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.

5. (computing, Microsoft Windows) A group of domains that are managed as a unit.
   • 2008, Laura E. Hunter, Robbie Allen, Active Directory Cookbook, O'Reilly Media, Inc. (ISBN 9780596554446), page 17

     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.

6. The colour forest green.

• French: forêt, brousse, sylve, bois, bosquet
• German: Wald, Forst, Gehölz, Hain
• Italian: foresta, bosco, selva
• Portuguese: floresta, selva, bosque, mata
• Russian: лес
• Spanish: bosque, floresta, selva, foresta

• Italian: foresta
• Portuguese: floresta
• Russian: лес

• Italian: foresta

forest (forests, present participle foresting; past and past participle forested)

1. (transitive) To cover an area with trees.
   • 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:

     From the view-point of national economy professor smallcaps 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.

• afforest

• German: aufforsten
• Portuguese: florestar
• Spanish: forestar

1. Surname
2. A city/county seat in Scott County, Mississippi.