matchwood

English

Etymology

From match +‎ wood.

Noun

matchwood (countable and uncountable, plural matchwoods)

1. wood, often in the form of splinters, suitable for making matches
   • 1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter I, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], →OCLC:

     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.

   • 1952, C. S. Lewis, chapter 8, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Collins, published 1998:

     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.

   • 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Harry Willetts, The Gulag Archipelago, volume 3, Harper & Row, Part V, Chapter 2, p. 49:

     The prison at Omsk, which had known Dostoyevsky, was not like any old Gulag transit prison, hastily knocked together from matchwood.

   • 2020 October 7, Philip Haigh, “From Southall to Carmont... how to keep passengers safe”, in Rail, page 46:

     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."

References

• “matchwood”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Anagrams

• doomwatch