Word of the Day

: October 10, 2015

wooden

adjective WOOD-un

What It Means

1 : made or consisting of wood

2 : lacking ease or flexibility : awkwardly stiff

wooden in Context

In the early days of basketball, baskets were often attached to balconies over which interfering spectators could lean—until wooden backboards made that interference impossible.

"Nick … is a fascinatingly flawed and sometimes explosive good-guy personality with his own demons. It's this deep character development … that distinguishes this novel from those in which wooden characters are only there to move the plot along." — Nancy Ward, The Alaska Dispatch News, 23 Aug. 2015

Did You Know?

Humans have been making objects out of wood since before there was an English language, but the adjectival use of wood didn't come into being until the 14th century, and wooden didn't appear until the 16th. (The word wood has ancient roots, but it originally existed only as a noun.) In Middle English, the adjective of choice was tree or treen, as in a "tree vessel" or "treen shoes." Treen in turn came from the Old English word trēowen, from the noun trēow ("tree") and the suffix -en, which was used to indicate that something was composed of a certain material. As far as we know, no one ever used treen figuratively to describe things that are stiff as a board, but wooden was put to broader use soon after it was first recorded.