thicket
Americannoun
-
thickets
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of thicket
before 1000; Old English thiccet (not recorded in ME), equivalent to thicce thick + -et noun suffix
Explanation
A thicket refers to a dense growth of bushes or trees — what you try to avoid by tending to the plants in your backyard. The word thicket comes from the word thick, which means close together or dense. If you are "thick as thieves," then you are close friends. A thicket is a growth of trees, bushes, or shrubbery that is very close together, often making it difficult for people to walk through or for Red Riding Hood to find her way out of to Grandmother's.
Vocabulary lists containing thicket
"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell
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This Week in Words: December 2 - 8, 2017
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
But when they got going, builders hit a thicket of utilities running under the road.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 15, 2026
Eventually they do and Navratil plunges into a thicket of grass next to a corrugated metal wall, emerging with six tiny kittens clutched to her chest.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 8, 2026
The pair try to evade the bison by running through a thicket of trees, but the animal eventually caught Isom-McDaniel.
From BBC ● Jul. 13, 2026
The trade-off for markets, and indeed for the economy as a whole, is whether a Warsh-led Fed, and its pursuit of independence, can navigate the thicket of complexity expected over the coming year.
From Barron's ● Jun. 18, 2026
Once safely out of view of the village, he wasted no time in getting back to the thicket.
From "Chasing Lincoln's Killer" by James L. Swanson
Mr. Schaller spent three years studying lions in Africa, once crawling through thorny thickets to count cubs a lioness had hidden there.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 30, 2025
Pygmy slow loris are a species of primate that comes from the rainforests and bamboo thickets of Vietnam, Laos, eastern Cambodia and southern China.
From BBC ● Jun. 16, 2025
Caruso, 66, has deep experience in building — or attempting to build — in cities across the region and navigating thickets of red tape.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 3, 2025
Traveling along the Paraná, Darwin observed thickets which “afford a retreat for capybaras and jaguars. The fear of the latter animal quite destroyed all pleasure in scrambling through the woods.”
From Salon ● Sep. 7, 2024
Paths, which in daylight seem clearly trodden ways, twist and turn in the night, looping back on themselves and vanishing into dense thickets.
From "Ruby Holler" by Sharon Creech
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
