A jungle is an area of land in the tropics overgrown with dense vegetation.
The word jungle originates from the Sanskrit word jangala (जंगल) which referred to uncultivated land. Although the Sanskrit word refers to "dry land", it has been suggested that an Anglo-Indian interpretation led to its connotation as a dense "tangled thicket".[1] while others have argued that a cognate word in Urdu did refer to forests.[2] The term is prevalent in many languages of South Asia, and Iranian plateau, particularly in Bangla, Hindi, Marathi, Urdu, Punjabi and Persian.[3]
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The undergrowth in a rainforest is restricted in many areas by the poor penetration of sunlight to ground level. If the leaf canopy is destroyed or thinned, the ground beneath is soon colonized by a dense, tangled growth of vines, shrubs and small trees; this is called a jungle. There are two types of rainforest, tropical rainforest and temperate rainforest.
About 10% of the Earth's land mass consists of the ecosystems that could qualify as jungle under the common usage of the word. 57% of all known terrestrial species live in jungle environments.[4] In common usage, forests of northern Thailand or southern Guangdong in China would qualify as tropical rainforest, but scientifically, these are "monsoon forests" or "tropical deciduous forests" but not rain forests.
As a metaphor, jungle often refers to situations that are unruly or lawless, or where the only law is perceived to be "survival of the fittest". This reflects the view of "city people" that forests are such places. Conversely, the metaphor can be applied to inner-city areas, as in the song "Welcome to the Jungle" by Guns 'n' Roses, which depicts a dark side of Los Angeles where people live "like animals". Upton Sinclair gave the title The Jungle (1906) to his famous book about the life of workers at the Chicago Stockyards portraying the workers as being mercilessly exploited with no legal or other lawful recourse.[5]
The term "The Law of the Jungle" is also used in a similar context, drawn from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894) - though in the society of jungle animals portrayed in that book and obviously meant as a metaphor for human society, that phrase referred to an intricate code of laws which Kipling describes in detail, and not at all to a lawless chaos.