''arboreal'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''arboreal'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250819013733-00-⌔

arboreal - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

arboreal

• Of, relating to, or resembling a tree.
  • ✤ High and sacred, in good troth, is the power of the microcosmical spirit, which without any arboreal trunck produceth a true Cherry:¹
  • ✤ The sleek Brazilian jaguar
    Does not in its arboreal gloom
    Distil so rank a feline smell
    As Grishkin in a drawing-room.²
  • ✤ In the mild breezes of the west and of the east lofty trees wave in different directions their first class foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which that region is thoroughly well supplied.³
  • ✤ Only short blocks away traffic flowed turbulently on Flatbush Avenue […] but here the arboreal green and the pollen-hazy light, the infrequent trucks and cars, the casual pace of the few strollers at the park’s border all created the effect of an outlying area in a modest Southern city […]⁴
  • ✤ No trees have grown on the windswept Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean for tens of thousands of years — just shrubs and other low-lying vegetation. That’s why a recent arboreal discovery nearly 20 feet (6 meters) beneath the ground caught researchers’ attention.⁵
• Living in or among trees.
  • ✤ If the harvest mouse had been more strictly arboreal, it would perhaps have had its tail rendered structurally prehensile, as is the case with some members of the same order.⁶
  • ✤ An arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical trees.⁷
  • ✤ […] faced with this emergency, Tessie took Chapter Eleven and me up to the attic. Maybe it was a vestige of our arboreal past; we wanted to climb up and out of danger.⁸
  • ✤ Typically, tarantulas are either terrestrial or arboreal, but the Chilobrachys natanicharum can live in both enivronments${}^{[sic]}$, the researchers said, demonstrating its adaptability.⁹
• Covered or filled with trees.
  • ✤ Synonym: arboreous
  • ✤ The breadth of the arboreal landscape requires a longer list of living creatures, and creatures of greater bulk.¹⁰
  • ✤ She married him, and the two of them settled down in this quiet, arboreal part of Kensington:¹¹
  • ✤ mountains, unlike the arboreal garden and the sacred stream, had gone unmentioned in the account of Creation given in Genesis¹²

Noun

arboreal (plural arboreals)

• Any tree- dwelling creature.
  • ✤ So, by learning to use their eyes to more and more advantage the arboreals added another treasure to the foundation of human intelligence.¹³

Etymology

From Latin arboreus (“tree-like”) +‎ -al, mid-17th century.

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA: /ɑɹˈbɔɹi.əl/
• (UK) IPA: /ɑːˈbɔːɹɪ.əl/
• Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• Rhymes: -ɔːɹiəl

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

1. 1650, Jan Baptist van Helmont, “Of the Magnetick Cure of Wounds”, in Walter Charleton, transl., A Ternary of Paradoxes ‎${}^{[1]}$, London: William Lee, page 72: ↩

2. 1919, T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality”, in Selected Poems ‎${}^{[2]}$, Penguin, published 1948: ↩

3. 1922, James Joyce, Ulysses ‎${}^{[3]}$, London: The Egoist Press, page 282: ↩

4. 1979, William Styron, chapter 2, in Sophie’s Choice ‎${}^{[4]}$, New York: Random House, page 37: ↩

5. 2024 September 27, Katie Hunt, “Scientists discover hidden ancient forest on treeless island”, in CNN ‎${}^{[5]}$: ↩

6. 1872, Charles Darwin, chapter 7, in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection ‎${}^{[6]}$, 6th edition, London: Odhams Press, page 233: ↩

7. 1911, Ambrose Bierce, “monkey”, in The Devil’s Dictionary, New York, N.Y.; Washington, D.C.: The Neale Publishing Company, →OCLC: ↩

8. 2002, Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex ‎${}^{[7]}$, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Book 3, p. 239: ↩

9. 2023 September 26, Hafsa Khalil, “Electric blue tarantula species discovered in Thailand”, in CNN ‎${}^{[8]}$: ↩

10. 1885, Richard Jefferies, “Forest”, in The Open Air, ‎${}^{[9]}$, London: Chatto and Windus, page 188: ↩

11. 1945, Elizabeth Bowen, “The Demon Lover”, in The Demon Lover and Other Stories, ‎${}^{[10]}$, London: Jonathan Cape, page 96: ↩

12. 1995, Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory ‎${}^{[11]}$, New York: Knopf, Part 3, Chapter 7, p. 426: ↩

13. 1971, Theo Lang, The difference between a man and a woman: ↩

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