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Because European explorers initially travelled through tropical forests largely by river, the dense tangled vegetation lining the stream banks gave a misleading impression that such jungle conditions existed throughout the forest. As a result, it was wrongly assumed that the entire forest was impenetrable jungle.[15][16] This in turn appears to have given rise to the second popular usage of jungle as virtually any humid tropical forest.[17] Jungle in this context is particularly associated with tropical forest,[6][18] but may extend to cloud forest, temperate rainforest and mangroves[17][19] with no reference to the vegetation structure or the ease of travel.The word "Tropical forest" has largely replaced "Jungle" as the descriptor of humid tropical forests, a linguistic transition that has occurred since the 1970s. "Rainforest", a specific type of tropical forest that does not occur in the Indian sub-continent, itself did not appear in English dictionaries before the 1970s.[20] The word "jungle" accounted for over 80% of the terms used to refer to tropical forests in print media before the 1970s, since when "rainforest" has been used widely,[21] although "jungle" still remains common in discourse when referring to tropical forests
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