bush
Definitions
General English
- noun a small tree
Agriculture
- noun a plant with many woody stems
- noun in semi-arid regions, natural land covered with bushes and small trees
Cars & Driving
- noun a thin metal sleeve fitted into a circular hole and acting as a bearing for a shaft or similar inserted into it.
Slang
- adjective provincial or primitive. A term that can mean either rural or second-rate, or both. Much used in Australia in expressions such as ‘bush scrubber’ and ‘bush lawyer’ and, to a lesser extent, in the USA where it is often in the form bush-league, meaning small-town or small-time.
- noun the pubic hair area. The term is used more often by men of a woman’s pubic hair than vice versa.
- noun marihuana, grass. A common term among smokers in the Caribbean and Britain. Bush refers especially to cannabis leaves and seeds sold unsorted and uncleaned.
Origin & History of “bush”
Bush comes ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic *busk-, which also produced German busch ‘bush’. there is no actual record of the word in Old English, but it probably existed as *bysc. The Germanic base was also borrowed into the romance languages, where in French it eventually produced bois ‘wood’. A diminutive form of this gave English bouquet (18th c.), while a variant bosc may have been at least partly responsible for the now archaic English bosky ‘wooded’ (16th c.). A derived vulgar Latin verb *imboscāre gave English ambush.
