There's Truth in Trees

Go back a thousand years in English, and you’ll find the word tree.

Sure, it was pronounced and written a little differently during Old English, circa 800-1100 CE. The word was written as treow, pronounced something like treh-oh.

Eventually, that -oh had to go. By Middle English, scribes were already spelling it t-r-e-e, although there were rival variants like tre and trew.

By the time of Shakespeare, it was out of fashion to end English words with an -eh sound, so -ee won out, and the rest is histor-tree.

Go back much further and you can see that truth and tree are really the same word. That is, they come from the same Proto-Indo-European root word.

The PIE root deru seems to have meant firm or solid, like a well-built house or the trunk of a tree. In the same way that Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French diverged from Latin, PIE roots diverged into multiple languages, and the word deru is a great example of this.

The divergence in meaning (the branching, if you will) took place some time before Germanic languages took hold in northern central Europe. One branch now clearly meant tree or wood, while another branch meant firm or sturdy… or true.

There’s truth in trees in another way, too.

Count the rings of a tree, and you can tell how many years it has been alive. This is because the tree grows outward, adding a new layer each year. The seasons change in predictable ways, so spring makes a lighter band and fall makes a darker one.

These tree rings tell more than just the amount of time that has passed, though. Wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and even cosmic events can be read by looking at tree rings. There are truths hidden in there that we could never know otherwise.

It’s tree, I swear!