A forest is a large area of trees anywhere. A jungle is found in the tropics and is a an area with lots of lush vegetation. A rainforest is an area of forest found in the tropics that experiences heavy rainfall.

A rainforest has a very technical definition, but colloquially it is very similar to a jungle. Jungles and rainforest have very dense foliage, plants, trees, and often distinct ecosystems that exist in different layers of the canopy/floor. Although some rainforests can technically not be in tropical latitudes, they generally are tropic, hot, and experience frequent rainfall. Rainforests are marked by very large amounts of rainfall. Forests are usually in non-tropical areas and are more sparse, i.e. are less thick with regard to trees, foliage, leaves, and plants when compared with jungles/rainforests. You can often walk through a forest (with some difficulty), but jungles are extra thick and may require a machete to cut a path through the foliage.

‘Rainforest’ is generally a climatic term defined by the amount of rain that falls. The most well-known rainforests are tropical rainforests but I live near temperate rain forests in the northwestern US. They are interesting because they contain so much life. ‘Jungle’ is a less technical word meaning a dense forest with tangled vegetation in which it is hard to move, always in a hot climate. It includes tropical rainforests, but is broader than that. In a colder climate, we’d use adjectives like ‘dense’, ‘thick’ or ‘impenetrable’, possibly with intensifiers, to describe forests with so much vegetation that they are difficult to move through.