birchbark canoe
- noun
- /bɜrʧbɑrk kəˈnu/
- US
:
canoa de corteza de abedul
- The skilled craftsman built a traditional birchbark canoe using only materials found in the forest.
Examples
-
For their camping trip, they chose a lightweight birchbark canoe to navigate the tranquil lake.
-
This paper offers a beautifully detailed description of the making of a birchbark canoe by two experts in their seventies.
Academic text (1990) -
She leapt with pointed toes down the rock and into a birchbark canoe.
Fiction book (1993) -
These vessels, a birchbark canoe and a European ship, represented the laws and customs of each people; the agreement stated that neither would impede the other's progress.
Academic text (2011) -
During the expedition, they traveled down the river in a birchbark canoe that glided smoothly over the water.
Synonyms
120
1.0
A narrow light boat with pointed ends that you move with a paddle
1
9.9
A long narrow wooden boat carved from one tree trunk
1
7.2
A light boat made from birch tree bark and used by Native people in North America
1
5.3
A small boat carved from one large tree trunk
A light canoe made by stretching birch bark over a wooden frame
How Light
Surface Forms
Morphology
birchbark + canoe
The phrase is transparently compositional: a B1 learner who knows 'birch' (a type of tree), 'bark' (the tree's outer layer) and 'canoe' (a lightweight boat) can readily infer a canoe made from birch bark. The noun–noun compound follows a common compounding pattern and the material-for-object logic is cross-linguistically familiar, so prior exposure is not required for basic understanding.
Etymology
Birchbark canoe comes from a simple picture: people made a light wooden frame and stretched sheets of birch bark over it to make a fast, waterproof canoe. That's why the name now means 'a light boat made from birch bark'.