spruce
IPA: sprˈus
noun
- Any of various large coniferous evergreen trees or shrubs from the genus Picea, found in northern temperate and boreal regions; originally and more fully spruce fir.
- (uncountable) The wood of a spruce.
- (used attributively) Made of the wood of the spruce.
- (obsolete) Prussian leather; pruce.
- (obsolete) Prussia.
- A surname.
- A number of places in the United States:
- An unincorporated community in Caledonia Township, Alcona County, Michigan.
- A township in Roseau County, Minnesota, named for spruce trees there.
- An unincorporated community in Bates County, Missouri.
- A town and unincorporated community therein, in Oconto County, Wisconsin.
verb
- (usually with up) To arrange neatly; tidy up.
- (transitive, intransitive, usually with up) To make oneself spruce (neat and elegant in appearance).
- To tease.
adjective
- (comparable) Smart, trim, and elegant in appearance; fastidious (said of a person).
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Examples of "spruce" in Sentences
- The spruce trees and Scotch fir were our stronghold, and it was in spruce thickets we made our hiding-places by day.
- Conifers predominate in the forests of Canada, and amongst those conifers spruce is by far the most abundant growth.
- Often called the "People's Tree," this year's tree is an 85-foot blue spruce from the two million-acre Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona.
- The hemlock spruce is a very common tree in this part of the country, and an imposing evergreen, ranking in height with the tallest oaks, and ashes, and elms of the forest.
- The "black" or "double spruce" (_Pinus nigra_), is that species from the twigs of which is extracted the essence that gives its peculiar flavour to the well-known "_spruce beer_."
- The next day, as we come down Eighth Street at dusk, with shop lights casting color on the hard-packed snow, she impulsively buys a small fat spruce from the Italian with the truck.
- Governor Chafee's solution to call the spruce in the State House a "Holiday Tree" has elicited howls of outrage from citizens complaining of the secularization of this Christian holiday.
- Such is the bacillus Thurigiensis which is currently under investigation and may well prove to be an effective agent against the budworm disease in spruce, which is at present devastating some of our eastern forests.
- Prussia, which we call spruce, and Norway (especially from Gottenberg) and about Riga, are the best; unless we had more commerce of them from our Plantations in New England, which are preferable to any of them; there lying rotting at present at Pascataway, a mast of such prodigious dimensions, as no body will adventure to ship, and bring away.
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