Word.ws English Dictionary

warwood

warwood noun: wood used for military materiel, especially in the context of historical warfare.

Noun

warwood (uncountable)

  1. Wood used for military materiel, especially in the context of historical warfare
    • Sons of battle! Hunters of men!
      Raise high your war-wood!
      Hack away merry men, hack away.1849, Herman Melville, Mardi
    • Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea warwood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers.
    • ...little canoes of dark wood, like the rich warwood of his native isle.1851 November 14, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC

Origin of warwood

From war + wood. Perhaps at least partly an allusion to koa (Acacia koa), a tree endemic to Hawaii with wood similar in quality to Juglans nigra, black walnut, and whose name in Hawaiian can also mean warrior, or to beefwood (Casuarina equisetifolia) which also has deep-colored, hard wood and in some Polynesian languages shares the same association between the name and words for warriors (both cognate with the Hawaiian term).

Questions about warwood

What does warwood mean?
Warwood means wood used for military materiel, especially in the context of historical warfare.
What part of speech is warwood?
Warwood is a noun.

Words near warwood in the dictionary

  1. Warwikeshire
  2. warwolf
  3. warwolves
  4. warwoman
  5. warwomen
  6. warwood
  7. warwork
  8. warworker
  9. warworkers
  10. warworn
  11. wary

Source and license

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