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• tree
  tree

  noun

  a plant having a permanently woody main stem or trunk, ordinarily growing to a considerable height, and usually developing branches at some distance from the ground.
• Tree
  Tree

  noun

  Sir Herbert Beerbohm Herbert Beerbohm, 1853–1917, English actor and theater manager; brother of Max Beerbohm.

tree

¹ American  

[tree] / tri /

noun

• trees
  plural

1. a plant having a permanently woody main stem or trunk, ordinarily growing to a considerable height, and usually developing branches at some distance from the ground.

2. any of various shrubs, bushes, and plants, as the banana, resembling a tree in form and size.

3. something resembling a tree in shape, as a clothes tree or a crosstree.

4. Mathematics, Linguistics. tree diagram.

5. family tree.

6. a pole, post, beam, bar, handle, or the like, as one forming part of some structure.

7. a shoetree or boot tree.

8. a saddletree.

9. a treelike group of crystals, as one forming in an electrolytic cell.

10. a gallows or gibbet.

11. the cross on which Christ was crucified.

12. Computers. a data structure organized like a tree whose nodes store data elements and whose branches represent pointers to other nodes in the tree.

13. Christmas tree.

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verb (used with object)

• trees,
  present (3rd person singular)
• treed,
  past participle,  past
• treeing
  present participle

1. to drive into or up a tree, as a pursued animal or person.

2. Informal. to put into a difficult position.

3. to stretch or shape on a tree, as a boot.

4. to furnish (a structure) with a tree.

idioms

1. up a tree, in a difficult or embarrassing situation; at a loss; stumped.

Tree ² American  

[tree] / tri /

noun

1. Sir Herbert Beerbohm Herbert Beerbohm, 1853–1917, English actor and theater manager; brother of Max Beerbohm.

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Tree ¹ British  

/ triː /

noun

1. Sir Herbert Beerbohm . 1853–1917, English actor and theatre manager; half-brother of Sir Max Beerbohm. He was noted for his lavish productions of Shakespeare

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tree ² British  

/ triː /

noun

1. any large woody perennial plant with a distinct trunk giving rise to branches or leaves at some distance from the ground

2. any plant that resembles this but has a trunk not made of wood, such as a palm tree

3. a wooden post, bar, etc

4. See family tree shoetree saddletree

5. chem a treelike crystal growth; dendrite

6. 1. a branching diagrammatic representation of something, such as the grammatical structure of a sentence

   2. ( as modifier )

      a tree diagram

7. an archaic word for gallows

8. archaic the cross on which Christ was crucified

9. in the highest position of a profession, etc

10. informal in a difficult situation; trapped or stumped

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verb

1. to drive or force up a tree

2. to shape or stretch (a shoe) on a shoetree

tree Scientific  

/ trē /

1. Any of a wide variety of perennial plants typically having a single woody stem, and usually branches and leaves. Many species of both gymnosperms (notably the conifers) and angiosperms grow in the form of trees. The ancient forests of the Devonian, Mississippian, and Pennsylvanian periods of the Paleozoic Era were dominated by trees belonging to groups of seedless plants such as the lycophytes. The strength and height of trees are made possible by the supportive conductive tissue known as vascular tissue.

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tree More Idioms  

1. see bark up the wrong tree; can't see the forest for the trees; talk someone's arm off (the bark off a tree); up a tree.

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• treelessness
  noun
• treeless
  adjective
• treelike
  adjective

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• trees
  plural

Participles

• treeing
  present
• treed
  past

Conjugated Forms

Present

• tree
  simple
• trees
  simple
• have treed
  perfect
• has treed
  perfect
• am treeing
  progressive
• are treeing
  progressive
• is treeing
  progressive
• have been treeing
  perfect progressive
• has been treeing
  perfect progressive

Past

• treed
  simple
• had treed
  perfect
• was treeing
  progressive
• were treeing
  progressive
• had been treeing
  perfect progressive

Future

• will tree
  simple
• will have treed
  perfect
• will be treeing
  progressive
• will have been treeing
  perfect progressive

Etymology

Origin of tree

First recorded before 900; Middle English; Old English trēo(w); cognate with Old Frisian, Old Norse trē, Old Saxon treo, Gothic triu; akin to Greek drŷs “oak,” Sanskrit, Avestan dru “wood”

Explanation

A tree is a large plant with a trunk, branches, and leaves. If you have an apple tree in your backyard, you'll have apples in the fall — and a nice shady place to sit in the summer. The thick, woody trunk is actually the stem of a tree, and its ability to grow so much taller than other plants evolved partly as a way for trees to absorb more sunlight. Trees do a lot for humans, including providing oxygen, giving us places to climb, producing fruit, shading us, and providing lumber and fuel. As a verb, tree means "chase into a tree," the way your dog might tree the neighbor's cat.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

tree Tree trees treed treeing

Nearly the entire statistical signal was coming from a single branch of the insect family tree.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 15, 2026

The little boy adds a bright rainbow, a shining sun and a tall tree to his illustration, while other displaced children paint alongside him at a shelter in Pereira.

From Barron's ● Aug. 14, 2026

It sort of looks like a fuzzy seed from a chestnut tree.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 12, 2026

A tree planting scheme has received £8.7m of government funding to expand the project as organisers celebrate planting more than two million trees.

From BBC ● Aug. 10, 2026

The branches of every tree cracked and moaned, straining against Pain’s rage.

From "The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest" by Aubrey Hartman

Chris Higgins, a retired scientist and volunteer at Lime Tree Observatory and Planetarium in Grewelthorpe, North Yorkshire, added it is still "certainly worth" seeing it from the UK.

From BBC ● Aug. 8, 2026

In 2022, while playing the Tree, Stanford’s unofficial mascot, he unfurled a 40-foot banner that read, “Stanford Hates Fun.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 31, 2026

Both Wisdom Tree and Amplify were willing to talk to me about their experiences so far running these funds.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 24, 2026

Tree growth depends on internal water pressure, and that pressure drops quickly during hot, dry conditions.

From Science Daily ● Jul. 9, 2026

She cannot light a candle on the Wishing Tree, though the wishes that hang on its branches continue to burn.

From "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern

Some had trees growing through fallen roofs, one had a wasp nest peeking out the window, and many had red diamonds indicating they were at risk of collapse.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 17, 2026

The Palace of Versailles, south of the French capital Paris, appears as an island of trees surrounded by brown fields in these images.

From BBC ● Aug. 15, 2026

They then placed those characteristics onto two of the largest available species level insect family trees.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 15, 2026

"First of all, there's nature, of course -- there are the trees, the grass," she said, noting, "the trees already look like autumn."

From Barron's ● Aug. 15, 2026

She was almost out of sight now in among the trees, as Mutti came stumbling back towards us.

From "An Elephant in the Garden" by Michael Morpurgo

The treed “Woodland Garden” to the west, with black tupelo and swamp white oaks, gives way to a “Perennial Meadow,” whose asters, purple beebalms and orange butterfly weed were chosen for their chromatic effect.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 24, 2025

The cattle, which were tracked from June to August over two years, had access to 625 acres of grasslands and treed areas ranging in elevation from 600 to 2,028 feet.

From Science Daily ● Mar. 27, 2024

Set in an especially cheerless pocket of Southern California, where high-voltage lines loom over the sparsely treed landscape, it opens in the summer.

From New York Times ● Mar. 2, 2023

Some farmers positioned portable wind breaks and used treed areas to protect their herds from potentially deadly winds, said Karin Schmid, beef production and extension lead at the Alberta Beef Producers industry group.

From Reuters ● Dec. 23, 2022

Rowdy had something treed in a huge bur oak that was a solid mass of green.

From "Summer of the Monkeys" by Wilson Rawls

By 10 a.m. the dogs didn’t appear any closer to treeing whatever it was they were chasing.

From Washington Times ● Apr. 3, 2016

Jenkins, the special counsel to the Senate subcommittee investigating the case of Joe McCarthy v. the Army, had the air of an hound treeing an coon.

From Time Magazine Archive

Well-fed raccoons lay trails to nearby trees, which the hounds are allowed to bark up only briefly to minimize sight treeing.

From Time Magazine Archive

He went to work then, trailing and treeing the squirrels that Little Arliss was scaring up off the ground.

From "Old Yeller" by Fred Gipson

Last of all, the shoe is put upon a treeing machine, where an iron foot stretches it into precisely the shape of the wooden last on which it was made.

From Makers of Many Things by Eva March Tappan

Related Words

• forest
• sapling
• seedling
• shrub
• timber
• wood