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
The Vocabulary.com Top 1000
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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
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"Indian Summer Sun" and "Almost Evenly Divided"
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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:
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
You don’t need the most expensive bottle on the shelf, nor one that arrives with a romantic backstory about a hillside grove.
From Salon ● Jun. 16, 2026
Additionally, just this March, it opened a conservation grove of Torrey pines grown from seeds collected on Santa Rosa.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 5, 2026
She remembered it from the banana grove outside the village.
From "A Girl Named Disaster" by Nancy Farmer
In reopening the mall, the billionaire real estate mogul whose company owns the Grove, the Americana at Brand and the Commons at Calabasas has taken something of a risk.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 15, 2026
When asked by broadcaster LBC if he should apologise to Grove, Sir Mark agreed and said the complaint should have been "screened out earlier on as not requiring investigation".
From BBC ● Aug. 6, 2026
Journalist Jack Grove said he was told by the Met it had looked into a complaint made by Jason Arday, which it closed, and that Grove should not contact Arday again.
From BBC ● Aug. 6, 2026
My colleague Thomas Grove and I spent weeks reporting this out.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 14, 2026
By the time of the Bohemian Grove retreat, they were ready with a proposal for their own big accelerator.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
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
The researchers also estimated that another 3,900 trees might have survived if every sequoia in the affected groves had received similar treatment.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 26, 2026
Among them are villagers from Ikizkoy in the Mugla region, who have mobilised to protect their olive groves from plans to expand a nearby brown coal lignite mine.
From Barron's ● May 15, 2026
We follow winding roads through ancient green groves, woodlands filled with secrets and murmurs and mist.
From "The Sea in Winter" by Christine Day
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.
