Orchard
name, noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A garden or an area of land for the cultivation of fruit or nut trees.
"[…]belts of thin white mist streaked the brown plough land in the hollow where Appleby could see the pale shine of a winding river. Across that in turn, meadow and coppice rolled away past the white walls of a village bowered in orchards,[…]"
- 2 garden consisting of a small cultivated wood without undergrowth wordnet
- 3 The trees themselves cultivated in such an area.
- 1 A topographic surname.
Example
More examples"Finally the children saw a little orchard in the middle of the mountain with apple trees growing inside it."
Etymology
From Middle English orchard, orcherd, from Old English orċeard, ortġeard, a compound of *ort (probably from Proto-Germanic *urtiz, a dissimilated variant of Proto-Germanic *wurt- (“wort (plant)”), later incorrectly associated with unrelated Latin hortus (“garden”)) + ġeard (see hortyard and yard, which ironically is etymologically linked with hortus). Cognate with Swedish örtagård (“herb garden”), Gothic 𐌰𐌿𐍂𐍄𐌹𐌲𐌰𐍂𐌳𐍃 (aurtigards, “orchard”), Old High German orzōn (“to cultivate a field”). Equivalent to wort + yard. More at root.
Topographic surname for someone who lived by an orchard.
Related phrases
More for "orchard"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.