Wold
adj, name, noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 An unforested or deforested plain, a grassland, a moor. archaic, regional
"Saint Withold footed thrice the ’old; He met the nightmare, and her nine fold;"
- 2 a tract of open rolling country (especially upland) wordnet
- 3 A wood or forest, especially a wooded upland. obsolete
- 1 Old. Devon, West-Country, archaic, dialectal
""[A] girt wind had a-blowed the wold tree auver, so that his head were in the water.""
- 1 A surname.
Example
More examples"Saint Withold footed thrice the ’old; He met the nightmare, and her nine fold;"
Etymology
From Middle English wald, wold, from Old English wald, weald (“highland covered with trees, wood, forest”), from Proto-West Germanic *walþu, from Proto-Germanic *walþuz, from Proto-Indo-European *wel(ə)-t-. Doublet of weald. Cognates See also Saterland Frisian Woold (“forest”), West Frisian wâld (“forest”), Bavarian Woid (“forest”), Cimbrian balt (“forest”), Dutch woud (“forest”), German Wald (“forest”), German Low German Woold, Woolt (“forest”), Luxembourgish Wal (“forest”), Mòcheno bòlt (“forest”), Yiddish וואַלד (vald, “forest”), Danish vold (“field, meadow”), val (“plain”), Faroese vøllur (“field, lawn”), Icelandic völlur (“field, lawn”), Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk voll (“field, meadow”), Swedish vall (“field, meadow”), Welsh gwallt (“hair”), Lithuanian váltis (“oat awn”), Serbo-Croatian vlât (“ear (of wheat)”), Ancient Greek λάσιος (lásios, “hairy”)); also the related term weald.
From Middle English wolde.
* As a Norwegian surname, spelling variant of Vold, Voll. * As an English surname, from wold (“forest”).
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.