Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
🪑 Useless people 🌳 Dead tree part
deadwood

deadwood

1 3.5
A dead branch or piece of wood on a tree
  • noun
  • /ˈdɛdˌwʊd/
translation icon : madera muerta
  • You pick up fallen deadwood for it.
  • gather some deadwood
  • cut down deadwood

The heart of the tree, any given tree, is mostly Deadwood, and the growing stuff is on the outside, is it not?

Autoplay Next

Examples

  • They fed deadwood into the flames and watched the fire dance against the night.

    Fiction book (1992)

  • All the deadwood is floating to the sawmill.

    Parental Guidance (2012)

  • So we went around that acre, all of us, and we gathered up all the Deadwood we could find and got a fire going right on the riverbank.

    Shawn Ryan Show

  • The rest of his chores were grunt work: setting up a rain fly and dining canopy, cleaning the fire pad, gathering some deadwood, and digging a latrine.

    Fiction book (1996)

  • Once everyone had washed up and changed, the scoutmasters divided the troop into several duty patrols, and Pesi found himself on the campfire preparation patrol, searching the grounds for deadwood.

    Fiction book (2001)

  • The gardener removed the deadwood from the tree to promote healthy growth.

  • They found a piece of deadwood on the trail that needed to be cleared away.

  • After the storm, the team collected deadwood from the forest floor for safety.

Surface Forms

deadwood singular
deadwoods plural

Morphology

deadwood = dead + wood (transparent) = dead + wood

A straightforward compound whose meaning 'a piece of wood that is dead' follows directly from 'dead' + 'wood'.

Etymology

Deadwood is made of the simple parts dead and wood, meaning 'dead' and 'tree material'. It names a branch or part of a tree that is no longer alive, like a dry stick on a tree, and gardeners often cut deadwood away to help the plant grow.