"matchwood" meaning in English

See matchwood in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: matchwoods [plural]
Etymology: From match + wood. Etymology templates: {{compound|en|match|wood}} match + wood Head templates: {{en-noun|~}} matchwood (countable and uncountable, plural matchwoods)
  1. wood, often in the form of splinters, suitable for making matches Tags: countable, uncountable
    Sense id: en-matchwood-en-noun-UwKF1AQn Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries

Inflected forms

{
  "etymology_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "match",
        "3": "wood"
      },
      "expansion": "match + wood",
      "name": "compound"
    }
  ],
  "etymology_text": "From match + wood.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "matchwoods",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "~"
      },
      "expansion": "matchwood (countable and uncountable, plural matchwoods)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Pages with 1 entry",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Pages with entries",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter I, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], →OCLC:",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1952, C. S. Lewis, chapter 8, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Collins, published 1998:",
          "text": "The brute had made a loop of itself round the Dawn Treader and was beginning to draw the loop tight. 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.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Harry Willetts, The Gulag Archipelago, volume 3, Harper & Row, Part V, Chapter 2, p. 49:",
          "text": "The prison at Omsk, which had known Dostoyevsky, was not like any old Gulag transit prison, hastily knocked together from matchwood.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2020 October 7, Philip Haigh, “From Southall to Carmont... how to keep passengers safe”, in Rail, page 46:",
          "text": "They noted: \"The crashworthiness of the early carriage was of a low standard. By the end of the 19th century, the continuous automatic brake and the absolute block system had greatly reduced the accident rate, but the accidents that did occur often reduced the wood vehicles to matchwood.\"",
          "type": "quote"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "wood, often in the form of splinters, suitable for making matches"
      ],
      "id": "en-matchwood-en-noun-UwKF1AQn",
      "links": [
        [
          "wood",
          "wood"
        ],
        [
          "splinter",
          "splinter"
        ],
        [
          "match",
          "match"
        ]
      ],
      "tags": [
        "countable",
        "uncountable"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "matchwood"
}
{
  "etymology_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "match",
        "3": "wood"
      },
      "expansion": "match + wood",
      "name": "compound"
    }
  ],
  "etymology_text": "From match + wood.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "matchwoods",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "~"
      },
      "expansion": "matchwood (countable and uncountable, plural matchwoods)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English compound terms",
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "English uncountable nouns",
        "Pages with 1 entry",
        "Pages with entries",
        "Quotation templates to be cleaned"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter I, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], →OCLC:",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1952, C. S. Lewis, chapter 8, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Collins, published 1998:",
          "text": "The brute had made a loop of itself round the Dawn Treader and was beginning to draw the loop tight. 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.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Harry Willetts, The Gulag Archipelago, volume 3, Harper & Row, Part V, Chapter 2, p. 49:",
          "text": "The prison at Omsk, which had known Dostoyevsky, was not like any old Gulag transit prison, hastily knocked together from matchwood.",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2020 October 7, Philip Haigh, “From Southall to Carmont... how to keep passengers safe”, in Rail, page 46:",
          "text": "They noted: \"The crashworthiness of the early carriage was of a low standard. By the end of the 19th century, the continuous automatic brake and the absolute block system had greatly reduced the accident rate, but the accidents that did occur often reduced the wood vehicles to matchwood.\"",
          "type": "quote"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "wood, often in the form of splinters, suitable for making matches"
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "wood",
          "wood"
        ],
        [
          "splinter",
          "splinter"
        ],
        [
          "match",
          "match"
        ]
      ],
      "tags": [
        "countable",
        "uncountable"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "matchwood"
}

Download raw JSONL data for matchwood meaning in English (2.4kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-12-08 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-12-04 using wiktextract (bb46d54 and 0c3c9f6). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.