silva

Silva, silvae, f., first declension. Printed editions often give sylva with a y; that is a Renaissance spelling on a false Greek trail and the word has nothing Greek about it. It runs from a single stand of trees to uncultivated forest at large, the territory outside the farm and the law.

The figurative sense is worth having. A silva is a mass of raw undigested material: Quintilian uses it for the heap of ideas a speaker gathers before shaping them, and that is why Statius called a book of occasional poems Silvae. Spanish selva and Italian selva keep the trees; English takes sylvan, silviculture and, through late Latin silvaticus, "of the woods", the word savage.