beech
/biːtʃ
/noun
1 (also beech tree) A large tree with smooth grey bark, glossy leaves, and hard, pale fine-grained timber.
- Genera Fagus (of the northern temperate zone) and Notofagus (the southern beeches, of Australasia and South America), family Fagaceae: many species.
- Nestled amid those trails and orange red maples, oaks, beeches and birches was the Lost River.
- Oaks, sycamores and beeches dotted well-tended lawns bordered by tarmacked paths and signposted at every junction.
1.1 (also beechwood) [mass noun] The hard, pale fine-grained timber of the beech: a worktop in solid beech...
- It looks like the leg of a very large beechwood coffee table.
- There are 72 in all, with big beechwood bedheads and furniture, white-tiled bathrooms and flowers everywhere (annual bill £34,000).
- Now she walked over to that chair and stroked her fingers across the top of its beechwood frame.
Origin
Old English bēce, of Germanic origin; related to Latin fagus 'beech', Greek phagos 'edible oak'.
book from Old English:
The forerunners of the modern book would have been scrolls of papyrus or parchment, or engraved tablets—the first example of what we might recognize as a book came in Roman times. The word book goes back to Old English and has related forms in most of the other northern European languages of the time. Their ancestor was probably a word related to beech (Old English), which would have been a wood that people used for engraving inscriptions. A bookmaker is someone who ‘makes a book’. Bookmakers keep a record of bets made with different people, which was originally done in a memorandum book.