Definition of "arboreal"

High and sacred, in good troth, is the power of the microcosmical spirit, which without any arboreal trunck produceth a true Cherry:

1650, Walter Charleton (translator), “Of the Magnetick Cure of Wounds” in A Ternary of Paradoxes, by Jan Baptist van Helmont, London: William Lee, p. 72

The sleek Brazilian jaguarDoes not in its arboreal gloomDistil so rank a feline smellAs Grishkin in a drawing-room.

1919, T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality”, in Selected Poems‎, Penguin, published 1948

In the mild breezes of the west and of the east lofty trees wave in different directions their first class foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which that region is thoroughly well supplied.

1922, James Joyce, Ulysses‎, London: The Egoist Press, page 282

Only short blocks away traffic flowed turbulently on Flatbush Avenue […] but here the arboreal green and the pollen-hazy light, the infrequent trucks and cars, the casual pace of the few strollers at the park’s border all created the effect of an outlying area in a modest Southern city […]

1979, William Styron, chapter 2, in Sophie’s Choice‎, New York: Random House, page 37

If the harvest mouse had been more strictly arboreal, it would perhaps have had its tail rendered structurally prehensile, as is the case with some members of the same order.

1872, Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, London: Odhams Press, 6th edition, Chapter 7, p. 233

An arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical trees.

1911, Ambrose Bierce, “monkey”, in The Devil’s Dictionary, New York, N.Y., Washington, D.C.: The Neale Publishing Company

[…] faced with this emergency, Tessie took Chapter Eleven and me up to the attic. Maybe it was a vestige of our arboreal past; we wanted to climb up and out of danger.

2002, Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex‎, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Book 3, p. 239

The breadth of the arboreal landscape requires a longer list of living creatures, and creatures of greater bulk.

1885, Richard Jefferies, “Forest”, in The Open Air,‎, London: Chatto and Windus, page 188

She married him, and the two of them settled down in this quiet, arboreal part of Kensington:

1945, Elizabeth Bowen, “The Demon Lover”, in The Demon Lover and Other Stories,‎, London: Jonathan Cape, page 96

mountains, unlike the arboreal garden and the sacred stream, had gone unmentioned in the account of Creation given in Genesis

1995, Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory‎, New York: Knopf, Part 3, Chapter 7, p. 426

So, by learning to use their eyes to more and more advantage the arboreals added another treasure to the foundation of human intelligence.

1971, Theo Lang, The difference between a man and a woman