Spruce

a genus of cone-bearing trees. The spruce belongs to the pine, rather than to the cypress group of evergreens. The cones are at the tips of the branches. The needles are keeled above and below, making them four-sided. They are scattered over the branchlets and point in every way. Spruce timber makes excellent lumber. Most newspapers are printed on paper made wholly or in part from spruce pulp. Bamboo pulp is the chief rival of spruce in paper making. The black spruce is from forty to fifty feet high. The white spruce, a handsomer tree, grows from fifty to one hundred fifty feet high. They are found from New England to Minnesota and northward. Resinous drops exuding from the bark of the spruce are collected for chewing gum. Engelmann's spruce is one of the finest timber trees of the Pacific Northwest. Under favorable circumstances it attains a trunk diameter of four to five feet, and yet in Alpine situations it becomes a prostrate shrub. Spruce is an old name for Prussia. It appears in spruce-leather and spruce-fir, meaning Prussian-leather and Prussian-fir. From spruce-leather the word spruce was extended to fashionable attire generally. As the name of a tree, spruce-fir was cut down to spruce. The phrase "to look spruce" has reference to foot-wear and dress, not to the trim, correct appearance of the spruce tree. See Paper