Woodside

Forms and etym.: see WOOD sb.¹ and SIDE sb.; also with gen. 4 wodessyde, 6 woodessyde. The side or edge of a wood.

  Chiefly in phr. with prep., as by or under the or a woodside = beside a wood; cf. BEDSIDE, ROADSIDE, WAYSIDE.

a. 1300.  Cursor M., 5734. Bi a wildrin wod side.

a. 1300.  K. Horn, 1024 (Camb.). His folk he dude abide Vnder wude side.

1375.  Barbour, Bruce, IX. 139. Thai that in the wodsyde weir.

c. 1400.  Parce Michi, 181, in 26 Pol. Poems, 148. By dale, by doune, by wodes syde.

c. 1430.  Lydg., Min. Poems (Percy Soc.), 110. So that ye wylle goo thys tyde Dowen to the chapylle under the wood syde.

1530.  Palsgr., 290/1. Woodessyde, oriere du boys.

a. 1533.  Ld. Berners, Huon, vii. 18. They came to a lytyll woodsyde.

1658.  Cromwell, Sp., 4 Feb. in Carlyle. I would have been glad to have lived under my woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than undertaken such a government as this.

1666.  Dryden, Ann. Mirab., ccxlviii. Thus to some desert Plain, or old Wood-side, Dire Night-hags come.

1774.  Goldsm., Nat. Hist., IV. 11. A buck, or male hare, is known by its chusing to run upon hard highways, feeding farther from the wood-sides, and making its doublings of a greater compass than the female.

1818.  Hazlitt, Eng. Poets, ii. (1870), 47. You see a little withered old man by a wood-side opening a wicket.

1853.  G. Johnston, Nat. Hist. E. Bord., I. 253. The woodside on the south is very swampy.

1865.  Kingsley, Herew., xxxv. It will be as well for some of us to remain here; and, spreading our men along the wood-side, prevent the escape of the villains.

1895.  Atlantic Monthly, March, 425/1. The snow may be gone from the fields except in grimy drifts, in hollows and along fences and woodsides.

  attrib.  1863.  Cowden Clarke, Shaks. Char., xvi. 402. Like a babbling woodside brook.

1871.  Palgrave, Lyr. Poems, 68. In the wood-side field.