These hunting forests

These hunting forests did not necessarily contain many, if any, trees. However, because hunting forests often included significant areas of woodland,

forest eventually came to connote woodland in general, regardless of the density of the trees.[citation needed] By the beginning of the Fourteenth Century, English texts used the word in all three of its senses: common, legal, and archaic.[19] Other English words used to denote “an area with a high density of trees” are firth, frith, holt, weald, wold, wood, and woodland.

Unlike forest, these are all derived from Old English and were not borrowed from another language. Some present classifications reserve woodland for denoting a locale with more open space between trees, and distinguish kinds of woodlands as open forests and closed forests premised on their crown covers.[21] Finally, sylva (plural sylvae or, less classically, sylvas) is a peculiar English spelling of the Latin silva, denoting a “woodland”, and has precedent in English, including

its plural forms. While its use as a synonym of forest and as a Latinate word denoting a woodland may be admitted, in a specific technical sense it is restricted to denoting the species of trees that comprise the woodlands of a region, as in its sense in the subject of silviculture.[22] The resorting to sylva in English indicates more precisely the denotation that use of forest intends.