Word.ws English Dictionary

matchwood

matchwood noun: wood, often in the form of splinters, suitable for making matches.

Noun

matchwood (countable and uncountable, plural matchwoods)

  1. Wood, often in the form of splinters, suitable for making matches.
    • The great stick was torn from his grasp and broken in two as though it had been matchwood, to be flung aside as the now infuriated beast charged for his adversary’s throat.1913, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan, New York: Ballantine Books, published 1963, page 45
    • The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs.1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter I, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], →OCLC

Examples of matchwood in a sentence

  • When it got quite tight—snap!—there would be floating matchwood where the ship had been and it could pick them out of the water one by one.1952, C. S. Lewis, chapter 8, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Collins, published 1998:
  • The prison at Omsk, which had known Dostoyevsky, was not like any old Gulag transit prison, hastily knocked together from matchwood.1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Harry Willetts, The Gulag Archipelago, volume 3, Harper & Row, Part V, Chapter 2, p. 49:

Forms of matchwood

pluralmatchwoods

Origin of matchwood

From match + wood.

Questions about matchwood

What does matchwood mean?
Matchwood means wood, often in the form of splinters, suitable for making matches.
How do you use matchwood in a sentence?
When it got quite tight—snap!—there would be floating matchwood where the ship had been and it could pick them out of the water one by one.
What part of speech is matchwood?
Matchwood is a noun.
What is the plural of matchwood?
The plural of matchwood is matchwoods.

Words near matchwood in the dictionary

  1. matchweek
  2. matchweeks
  3. matchwinner
  4. matchwinners
  5. matchwinning
  6. matchwood
  7. matchwoods
  8. matchy
  9. matchy-matchiness
  10. matchy-matchy
  11. mate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: matchwood (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: “matchwood.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/matchwood. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.