Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A mass of trees or shrubs; a thicket.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A mass of growing trees or shrubs; woods, groves, or thickets; sylvan scenery.
  • noun In old law, probably, food or sustenance for cattle which is yielded by bushes and trees.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A growth of trees or shrubs; underwood; a thicket; thick foliage; a wooded landscape.
  • noun (O. Eng. Law) Food or sustenance for cattle, obtained from bushes and trees; also, a tax on wood.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A place set with trees or mass of shrubbery, a grove or thicket.
  • noun law Mast-nuts of forest trees, used as food for pigs, or any such sustenance as wood and trees yield to cattle.
  • noun art Among painters, the term is used for a picture depicting a wooded scene.
  • noun A tax on wood.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English boskage, from Old French boscage, from bosc, forest, of Germanic origin.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From the Middle English boskage, from the Old French boscage, from Proto-Germanic *bosk (“forest, woods”).

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Examples

  • They had not gone far into the wood; Schilsky knew of a secluded seat, which was screened by a kind of boscage; and here they had remained.

    Maurice Guest 2003

  • The noun 'boscage' = jungle or _bush_ (M.E. _busch_,

    Milton's Comus John Milton 1641

  • There were none of those cataclysms of mire and sloughs of black mud and over-tall grasses, none of that miasmatic jungle with its noxious emissions; it was just such a scene as one may find before an English mansion — a noble expanse of lawn and sward, with boscage sufficient to agreeably diversify it.

    How I Found Livingstone Henry Morton 2004

  • Wherefore we bent our course thither, where we saw the appearance of land, all that night; and in the dawning of next day we might plainly discern that it was a land flat to our sight, and full of boscage, which made it show the more dark.

    The New Atlantis 2002

  • The band, hidden in a small, thick boscage of the wide gardens, broke into a mockingly cheerful air.

    Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 Various

  • We could not see the façade of the shaîtya on account of the concealing boscage of trees.

    Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 17, No. 097, January, 1876 Various

  • Now, it seems to me that when you old Aryans came from -- from -- well, from wherever you _did_ come from -- you branched out at first into a superb magnificence of religions and sentiments and imaginations and other boscage.

    Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 17, No. 097, January, 1876 Various

  • Polished automobiles gliding noiselessly through massed purple and silver shrubberies, receded into bland glooms of well-thought-out boscage.

    The Best Short Stories of 1920 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Various 1915

  • I do not know barnell, but the last twenty years have set many houses among the boscage.

    Highways and Byways in Surrey Eric Parker 1912

  • Caterham once was a valley; Aubrey wrote of it: "In this parish are many pleasant little vallies, stored with wild thyme, sweet marjoram, barnell, boscage, and beeches."

    Highways and Byways in Surrey Eric Parker 1912

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