thicket
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
- thicketed adjective
- thickety adjective
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.
Operating data centers in space would avoid an environmental thicket and require less water and energy for cooling.
From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 9, 2026
To make this photo I crawled into a thicket of ferns at the Sunset Marquis Hotel.
From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 23, 2025
A thicket of partnerships has sprung up in autonomous driving, with Uber also working with Waymo in US cities Austin and Atlanta, and with China's WeRide in Gulf locations such as Abu Dhabi.
From Barron's • Nov. 12, 2025
The facility sits notched into a thicket of pine trees, what locals call “the loggin’ woods.”
From Slate • May 2, 2025
“Near the bridge, in the willow thicket on the river bank, lay the broken-up machine with a black spider of a swastika on its tail unit,” said Nina.
From "A Thousand Sisters" by Elizabeth Wein
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.
