wood

wood or would? Do not confuse the spelling of wood and would, which sound similar. Wood refers to the hard substance that chiefly composes trees, or to an area covered by trees, as in boats made of wood, a path through the wood. Would indicates a conditional statement or introduces a polite request: I would write to her if I knew her address.Would you close the door, please.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, a poem (1923) by Robert Frost. In this much-anthologized poem, the narrator pauses on horseback, drawn into the dark beauty of the woods in snow. He lingers, attracted by the quiet, the solitude, and, according to many critics, the prospect of death, while yet considering the practical obligations of society. It ends with the famous lines, "But I have promises to keep,/ And miles to go before I sleep,/ And miles to go before I sleep.".

The ancestral meaning of wood is probably "collection of trees, forest." The meanings "tree" (now obsolete) and "substance from which trees are made" are secondary developments. It has been suggested that the word wood may go back to an Indo-European source meaning "separate," in which case it would originally have denoted a "separated" or "remote" piece of territory, near the outer edge or borders of known land. Since such remote, uninhabited areas were usually wooded, the word came to denote "forest."