Word.ws English Dictionary

tacamahac

tacamahac noun: a bitter balsamic resin or resinous exudation obtained from tropical American trees of the family Burseraceae (Bursera tomentosa and Icica tacamahaca), from East Indian trees of the genus Calophyllum, or from the balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera).

Noun

tacamahac (countable and uncountable, plural tacamahacs)

  1. A bitter balsamic resin or resinous exudation obtained from tropical American trees of the family Burseraceae (Bursera tomentosa and Icica tacamahaca), from East Indian trees of the genus Calophyllum, or from the balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera).
  2. Any tree yielding tacamahac resin, especially, in North America, balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera) or balm of Gilead.
    Synonyms:
    hackmatack, tamarack

Synonyms of tacamahac

Forms of tacamahac

pluraltacamahacs
alternative formtacamahaca

Origin of tacamahac

From Spanish, from Nahuatl thecomahaca, to use the spelling of Hernandez 1614. In European languages there was contamination between tacamahac and various Algonquian words containing the final Proto-Algonquian *-a·xkw- (“hardwood or deciduous tree”), including the sources of tamarack and hackmatack, as was already recognized by Chamberlain 1902.

Questions about tacamahac

What does tacamahac mean?
Tacamahac means a bitter balsamic resin or resinous exudation obtained from tropical American trees of the family Burseraceae (Bursera tomentosa and Icica tacamahaca), from East Indian trees of the genus Calophyllum, or from the balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera).
What part of speech is tacamahac?
Tacamahac is a noun.
What is the plural of tacamahac?
The plural of tacamahac is tacamahacs.

Words near tacamahac in the dictionary

  1. tac-nuking
  2. tacaco
  3. tacacos
  4. tacahout
  5. tacalcitol
  6. tacamahac
  7. tacamahaca
  8. tacamahacas
  9. tacamahack
  10. tacamahacs
  11. TACAMO

Source and license

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