holly.
Any of various shrubs or (mostly) small trees, of the genus Ilex, either evergreen or deciduous, used as decoration especially at Christmas.
Meaning & usage
Any of various shrubs or (mostly) small trees, of the genus Ilex, either evergreen or deciduous, used as decoration especially at Christmas.
We'll deck the halls with boughs of holly.
The wood from this tree.
Any of several not closely related plant species likened to Ilex because of their prickly, evergreen foliage and/or round, bright-red berries
Where this word comes from
From Middle English holly, holi, holie, a shortened variation of holin, holyn (> English dialectal hollen, holm), from Old English holeġn, holen (“holly; prince, protector”), from Proto-West Germanic *hulis (“holly”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *kelh₂- (“to beat, break”). Cognates Cognate with Scots holin, hollin, holyn (“holly”), Dutch hulst (“holly”), German Hulst (“holly”), French houx ("holly" < Germanic), Danish hylver (“holly”), Welsh celyn (“holly”), Russian ко́лос (kólos, “ear of wheat”), Albanian kalli (“straw, chaff”), Latin culmus (“stalk, stem”), Sanskrit कटम्ब (kaṭamba, “arrow”), Old Church Slavonic класъ (klasŭ, “ear of grain”).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.