any of about forty species of evergreen ornamental and timber trees . . . native to the temperate and cold regions of the Northern Hemisphere. They are pyramidal trees with whorled branches and thin, scaly bark . . . [with] hanging, persistent scaled egg-shaped or cylindrical cones.

It also tells us nothing about where the word spruce comes from. Believe it or not, the tree name has its roots in the one-time name of the kingdom of Prussia. Until the mid-1600s, that historic region was known as "Spruce" or "Spruce-Land." Back then, spruce also enjoyed what is known as an elliptical application: it was used as a sort of shorthand for something associated with Spruce-land, including spruce beer and spruce leather, a kind of smart leather imported from Prussia and used to make jerkins.

It is this latter usage that is thought to have inspired first the adjectival sense of spruce that means "neat or smart in appearance," and then the verb sense that means "to make a person or thing neat, smart, or spruce."