grove
noun
a small wood or forested area, usually with no undergrowth.
grove
1 American
[grohv]
/ groʊv /
noun
-
groves
plural
-
a small wood or forested area, usually with no undergrowth.
a grove of pines.
-
a small orchard or stand of fruit-bearing trees, especially citrus trees.
a grove of lemon trees.
Grove
2
American
[grohv]
/ groʊv /
noun
-
Sir George, 1820–1900, English musicologist.
-
Robert Moses Lefty, 1900–75, U.S. baseball player.
grove
British
/ ɡrəʊv /
noun
-
a small wooded area or plantation
-
-
a road lined with houses and often trees, esp in a suburban area
-
( capital as part of a street name )
Ladbroke Grove
-
Synonym Usage
See forest.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of grove
First recorded before 900; Middle English; Old English grāf
Explanation
A grove can be an orchard or a clump of trees that doesn't have much undergrowth and occupies a contained area, like an orange grove or a small shady grove of oak trees where you can have a picnic. You wouldn't call a forest or a large woods a grove — that's too big. And you wouldn't call two or three trees a grove either — that's too small. A grove is somewhere in between. You'll often hear the word refer to a group of trees cultivated by humans, often for commercial purposes, such as an apple grove planted to supply produce to grocery stores.
Vocabulary lists containing grove
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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
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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:
The grove on Santa Rosa Island, which sits about 26 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, is a genetically distinct subspecies that occurs nowhere else on Earth.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 2, 2026
Satellite images show tank tracks and destroyed structures in the area, with an olive grove more than 500m beyond the Yellow Line apparently torn down.
From BBC ● Jul. 30, 2026
David Sanchez, a 48-year-old painter and decorator, had just returned home to Cebreros after evacuating at the weekend to find that his small olive and pistachio grove had been consumed by the inferno.
From Barron's ● Jul. 27, 2026
We meet on a cloudy afternoon at the palace, a neo-Byzantine structure in a grove on the outskirts of Sofia.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 6, 2026
She didn’t like to go that way, but it was by far the quickest path to the sapling grove.
From "A Girl Named Disaster" by Nancy Farmer
Acranom snagged a Birch Grove contract, of more than $2.5 million, despite a general contractor’s complaints that its work on another school was so poor much of it had to be redone, according to prosecutors.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 8, 2026
The key to family harmony with either of these approaches is to maintain the person’s dignity as much as possible, said Kate Nattoli, a certified dementia practitioner with Crescent Grove Advisors.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 6, 2026
“A walk to the Grove, a movie over a shared tub of popcorn, and a stop at the Kibitz Room on the way home.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 2, 2026
The row recalls the controversy over Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir's The Serpent in the Grove, whose Commonwealth Short Story prize was initially withdrawn in July over allegations that it was written with generative AI.
From BBC ● Sep. 23, 2026
Before Gideon and I were on the road, he’d worked as a groundskeeper at the Maple Grove Park in Chicago.
From "Moon Over Manifest" by Clare Vanderpool
Almost 250 people died, while vineyards, orange groves and plots used to grow Albufera rice, an essential paella ingredient, were decimated.
From Barron's ● Sep. 26, 2026
Another company, Silvec, recently received EPA approval for a technology to help the trees already standing in Florida’s groves.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 19, 2026
On its 53-mile path to the Pacific Ocean, water ripped through orchards, uprooted orange groves and flipped cars.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2026
They take the olive groves and the goats and the summer houses, and they take the makeshift shelters and the fragile new footing of people who had already lost everything once.
From Salon ● Aug. 5, 2026
“Think about this place. After they plowed under all the tangerine groves, what did they do?”
From "Tangerine" by Edward Bloor
Definitions 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.
