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flax-sticks

flax-sticks is the plural of flax-stick.

Meaning of flax-stick

Noun

flax-stick (plural flax-sticks)

  1. (New Zealand) The flowering stem of the New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax or Phormium cookianum).
    • Rafts, or canoes, or “catamarans,” are still occasionally improvised by travellers or explorers in primitive parts of New Zealand, e.g. by Haast, who reports constructing “catamarans” of dead trees when flax-sticks were not obtainable.1869, W. Lauder Lindsay, On the Economical Value and Applications of the Leaf-Fibre of New Zealand Flax (Phormium tenax, Forst.): The Journal of Botany, British and Foreign, volume 7, page 46
  2. (Australia, obsolete, slang) A New Zealander.
    • "I always thought Australia was all good country," mused the driver—a flax-stick.1896, Henry Lawson, “His Country–After All”, in While the Billy Boils, Sydney, N.S.W.: Angus and Robertson […], →OCLC, page 51

Questions about flax-sticks

What is flax-sticks the plural of?
Flax-sticks is the plural of flax-stick.

Words near flax-sticks in the dictionary

  1. flax seeds
  2. flax-dresser
  3. flax-dressers
  4. flax-leaved daphne
  5. flax-stick
  6. flax-sticks
  7. flaxbird
  8. flaxbush
  9. flaxbushes
  10. Flaxby
  11. flaxcomb

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: flax-sticks (page history and authors); flax-stick (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “flax-sticks.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/flax-sticks. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.