warwood

English

Etymology

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).

Noun

warwood (uncountable)

1. 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 November 14, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:

     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