Why does woodsea look so plausible?

woodsea reads like a compound somebody could have coined: a wood, a sea. The fern has nothing to do with either. The wood in it is a man called Woods, and the ending is Latin. This is the trap in every commemorative name. The letters look like ordinary vocabulary and they are actually a person's surname, so guessing at the meaning takes you further from the spelling rather than closer to it.

An unstressed vowel, flattened until it gives the ear no information.