fir
Definitions
Agriculture
Construction
- A form of softwood indigenous to temperate zones, used principally for interior trim and framing. Varieties include Douglas fir, silver fir, balsam fir, and white fir.
- Although used most often to refer to Douglas fir, which is also a pseudo-fir, a general term forany of a number of species of conifers, including the true firs.
Economics
- (written as FIR)factor intensity reversal.
- acronym forFactor intensity reversal (written as FIR)
- A property of the technologies for two industries such that their ordering of relative factor intensities is different at different factor prices. For example, one industry may be relatively capital intensive compared to the other at high relative wages and labor intensive at low relative wages. Some propositions of the Heckscher-Ohlin Model require the absence of FIRs.
Military
- noun a tree which does not lose its leaves in winter (such as a pine, spruce, etc.)
Aviation
- acronym forflight information region (written as FIR)
- noun airspace with defined limits which has an air traffic control information and alerting service.
Origin & History of “fir”
As with many Indo-European tree-names, fir is a widespread term, but it does not mean the same thing wherever it occurs. Its prehistoric Indo-European ancestor was *perkos, which in Latin became quercus, the name for the ‘oak’. Nor was the application confined to southern Europe, for Swiss German has a related ferch ‘oak wood’. But by and large, the Germanic languages took the term over and applied it to the ‘pine’: German föhre, Swedish fura, and Danish fyr all mean ‘pine’. So also did Old English furh (known only in the compound furhwudu ‘pine-wood’), but this appears to have died out. It was replaced semantically by pine, but formally by middle English firre, a borrowing from the Old Norse form fyri- (also known only in compounds). This was used as a name not for the ‘pine’, but for the ‘fir’ (which in Old English times had been called sæppe or gyr).
