A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1323 entries
foray
A foray is a short expedition out and back, made to collect or to look. Among mycologists, a foray is an organized group outing to find and identify fungi, usually a day in the field followed by an afternoon of laying everything out on tables and working through it. Local societies have run them annually for well over a century.
Etymology
A foray was originally a raid to gather provisions, and the word is the same one as forage, which came into English from Old French out of a Germanic word for fodder. The raiding sense is why foray still carries a hint of going somewhere you have no permanent business being. The mushroom sense preserves the older meaning more faithfully than the military one does, since a foray is once again a party going out to gather food.
Notes
The British Mycological Society held its first foray in 1896 and has held them since, and the format spread to natural history societies everywhere. The word has also drifted into ordinary use for any brief venture into unfamiliar territory, which is a long way from a party of soldiers going out for hay.