warwood
English
Etymology
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).
Noun
warwood (uncountable)
- Wood used for military materiel, especially in the context of historical warfare
- 1849, Herman Melville, Mardi
- Sons of battle! Hunters of men!
- Raise high your war-wood!
- Hack away merry men, hack away.
- 1851, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
- 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.
- 1880, Gerald Manley Hopkins, "Spring and fall to a young child" in T.M. Flormata-Ballesteros, Speech and Oral Communication, page 144, →ISBN.
- By and by, nor spare a sigh
- Though worlds of warwood leafmeal lie
- 1849, Herman Melville, Mardi
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