The word "forest" comes from Middle English forest, from Old French forest "forest, vast expanse covered by trees", believed to be a borrowing of the Medieval Latin phrase forestem silvam "the outer woods". Forestam silvam was first used by Carolingian scribes in the Capitularies of Charlemagne to refer specifically to the king's royal hunting grounds. The term is not endemic to the Romance, and cognates in other Romance languages, such as Italian foresta, Spanish and Portuguese floresta, are all ultimately borrowings of the French word. Old French forest also benefited from confluence with Frankish forhist, a more general term meaning "woodland, area covered by trees", from Proto-Germanic fir-wood, coniferous forest, from Indo-European perkwu- "an oak, a coniferous or mountain forest, a wooded height". Uses of the word "forest" in English to denote any uninhabited area of non-enclosure are now considered archaic. The word was introduced by the Norman rulers of England as a legal term denoting an uncultivated area legally set aside for hunting by feudal nobility. These hunting forests were not necessarily wooded much, if at all. However, as hunting forests did often include considerable areas of woodland, the word "forest" eventually came to mean wooded land more generally. By the start of the fourteenth century the word appeared in English texts, indicating all three senses: the most common one, the legal term and the archaic usage.
Other terms used to mean "an area with a high density of trees" are wood, woodland, wold, weald and holt. Unlike forest, these are all derived from Old English and were not borrowed from another language. Some now reserve the term woodland for an area with more open space between trees.