timbered

1. 1
   adjective

   Constructed from timber, especially heavy or coarsely finished pieces of wood.

   The timbered cottage featured exposed beams across every room.

   Builders favored timbered frames for their strength and ready supply of wood.

   Similarwooden, beamed

2. 2
   adjective

   Covered with growing trees; wooded or forested.

   The well-timbered valley offered both shelter and a steady supply of fuel.

   Surveyors mapped the timbered ridges that bordered the open prairie.

   Similarwooded, forested, woody, treed

   Oppositetreeless, open, bare

   Note

   The word is built like bearded or walled: timber plus -ed, meaning "furnished with timber." Of land it usually takes a degree adverb, as in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "heavily timbered" tract (1846) or the islands "well timbered" in E. J. Guerin's Mountain Charley (1861). Before a noun the pair is hyphenated, as in a well-timbered valley. Said of a house or roof, the same word means built of wood instead.

3. 3
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of timber.

   The crew timbered the mine gallery to prevent cave-ins.

   Engineers timbered the entrance with heavy oak beams.

   Note

   A verb with more than one life sits behind this form. Used transitively, it means fitted with timbers, as when a crew timbered a mine gallery against collapse. In the passive, this use shades into the built-of-wood adjective. Used intransitively, a bird that has timbered has landed in a tree. Building in general and making a nest were once meanings too, but both are now obsolete.

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