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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
larch
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A thin squeaking betrayed the presence of two baby gold crests, precariously balanced on the branch of a larch.
▪ And near that plateau was a forest of larch and evergreen oak.
▪ I rubbed a patch clear and looked out hopefully; saw stone walls, the vague shapes of silver birch and larch.
▪ Some conifers, though, such as the larch, have adopted the deciduous habit too.
▪ The trees on this bog were bonsai-like black spruce, red maple, and occasional scrawny larch covered with lichens.
▪ There are many designs of tripod varying from interlocking A-frames to simple uprights made from the tips of larch or spruce trees.
▪ These and other shrubs were interspersed with small, scraggly larch and black spruce trees.
▪ They'd passed beyond the deciduous woods, and the trees on either side were conifers - larch, spruce and pine.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Larch

Larch \Larch\ (l[aum]rch), n. [Cf. OE. larege (Cotgrave), It. larice, Sp. larice, alerce, G. l["a]rche; all fr. L. larix, -icis, Gr. la`rix.] (Bot.) A genus of coniferous trees, having deciduous leaves, in fascicles (see Illust. of Fascicle).

Note: The European larch is Larix Europ[ae]a. The American or black larch is Larix Americana, the hackmatack or tamarack. The trees are generally of a drooping, graceful appearance.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
larch

1540s, from German Lärche, from Middle High German larche, from Old High German *larihha, from Latin larix (genitive laricis), probably a loan-word from an Alpine Gaulish language, corresponding phonetically to Old Celtic *darik- "oak" (see Druid and tree).

Wiktionary
larch

n. 1 (context countable English) A coniferous tree, of genus ''Larix'', having deciduous leaves, in fascicles. 2 (context uncountable English) The wood of the larch.

WordNet
larch
  1. n. wood of a larch tree

  2. any of numerous conifers of the genus Larix all having deciduous needlelike leaves [syn: larch tree]

Wikipedia
Larch

Larches are conifers in the genus Larix, in the family Pinaceae. Growing from 20 to 45 m tall (65 to 147 ft), they are native to much of the cooler temperate northern hemisphere, on lowlands in the north and high on mountains further south. Larches are among the dominant plants in the boreal forests of Siberia and Canada.

Although they are conifers, larches are deciduous trees that lose their leaves in the autumn. The shoots are dimorphic, with leaves borne singly on long shoots typically 10–50 centimetres long and bearing several buds, and in dense clusters of 20-50 needles on short shoots only 1–2 mm long with only a single bud. The leaves are needle-like, 2–5 centimetres long, slender (under 1 cm wide). The needles are deciduous, turning yellow and falling singly in the late autumn, leaving the trees leafless through the winter.

The female cones of larches cones are erect, small, 1–9 cm long, green or purple, ripening brown 5–8 months after pollination; in about half the species the bract scales are long and visible, and in the others, short and hidden between the seed scales. Those native to northern regions have small cones (1–3 cm) with short bracts, with more southerly species tending to have longer cones (3–9 cm), often with exserted bracts, with the longest cones and bracts produced by the southernmost species, in the Himalayas.

Larch (disambiguation)

A larch is a tree.

Larch, or Larches may also refer to:

  • Larch family of computer specification languages
  • Larch, Michigan, a community in the United States
  • Larch Hill, in Ireland
  • Larches, Preston, a district of Preston, in Lancashire, England
  • The Larches, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a building in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Larch (rocket engine)

The Larch was a family of rocket engine intended as an upgrade to Black Arrow launch vehicles. They were manufactured by Rolls Royce. They burned kerosene fuel and hydrogen peroxide.

Usage examples of "larch".

As they rode double through a small grove of trees, a mixture of spruce, birch, hornbeam, and larch, they came to a flowering glade, a small luxuriant meadow that was a verdant piece of the steppes, enclosed by trees.

A forest of delicate young larches crowded them in, their rich brown cones hanging like the knops that looped up their dark garments fringed with paler green.

The minister had used the influence of his office to fill the garden with exotic specimens from the widest reaches of the empire: camellias, crimson-berried nandins, even a golden larch.

The nerk called Larch, like me lacking splendipherins, had tarted himself up in dark leathers, obviously borrowed to impress.

The larch plantations would be a pale mist on the hillsides, the hazel coverts would be budding, plovers would be everywhere, and water ouzels would be flashing their white breasts among the stones.

Wilbur Larch could have guessed, the urogenital system that revealed Mr.

Wellingtonia of the Yosemite, are really gigantic, attaining a height of 250 feet, their huge stems, the warm red of cedar wood, rising straight and branchless for a third of their height, their diameter from seven to fifteen feet, their shape that of a larch, but with the needles long and dark, and cones a foot long.

Larch chose to be an obstetrician because the loss of his parents inspired him to bring more children into the world, but the road that led Larch to obstetrics was strewn with bacteria.

Dense and dismal plantations of black-looking Scotch firs are enlivened at intervals by the delicate and tender green spikelets of a sprouting larch.

Larch, the stationmaster became fairly aggressive in the presence of children and their imagined souls.

Larch could not have seen the weeds where the stationmaster lay stiffening, either.

Larch refrained from saying that by dying in this manner the stationmaster was intending a further inconvenience to the orphanage.

Larch was at the railroad station, personally accusing the stationmaster of losing an expected delivery of sulfa, a woman arrived at the hospital entrance, bent double with cramps and bleeding.

Larch spoke after the train had gone, the stationmaster thought that Larch might have been addressing the departed train.

The larch trees with their broken backs, the enormous black sky streaked with fistfuls of congealed fat, the abandoned Poor House that looked like a barn, the great brown dripping box of the Lutheran church bereft of sour souls, bereft of the hymn singers with poke bonnets and sunken and accusing horse faces and dreary choruses, a few weather-beaten cottages unlighted and tight to the dawn and filled, I could see at a glance, with the marvelous dry morality of calico and beans and lard, and then a privy, a blackened pile of tin cans, and even a rooster, a single live rooster strutting in a patch of weeds and losing his broken feathers, clutching his wattles, every moment or two trying to crow into the wind, trying to grub up the head of a worm with one of his snubbed-off claws, cankerous little bloodshot rooster pecking away at the dawn in the empty yard of some dead fisherman .