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PlainSpell

glade

/ɡleɪd/noun

glade is a noun meaning “An open passage through a wood; a grassy open or cleared space in a forest” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled G-L-A-D-E and has one syllable, and it appears about once in every 2 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of glade is glades.

What does glade mean?

noun

  1. 1

    An open passage through a wood; a grassy open or cleared space in a forest.

  2. 2

    colloquialAn everglade.

  3. 3

    An open space in the ice on a river or lake.

  4. 4

    A bright surface of ice or snow.

    a glade of ice

  5. 5

    obsoleteA gleam of light.

  6. 6

    obsoleteA bright patch of sky; the bright space between clouds.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce glade?

  • /ɡleɪd/

Glade has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-glade.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of glade

  • glades plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is glade?

Glade appears about once in every 2 million words in written English, the 37,943rd most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Glade in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense open space in the woods:

LanguageWords
Frenchclairière
GermanLichtung
Portugueseclareira
Spanishcalvero

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does glade come from?

From Middle English glade, glode, glede (“a gleam of light, bright space, an open space; an open or cleared space in a forest; a bright patch of sky; a bright surface of snow or ice”), of uncertain origin, perhaps from Old English *glǣd, *glād, related to Old English glæd (“shining, bright”), (compare Old Norse glaðr (“bright”)).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).