Woodwork

How to spell woodwork

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce woodwork

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does woodwork mean?

1. nounThe activity of making things from wood, or the wooden objects so made.
2. nounThe wooden fittings of a room or building, such as doors, skirting boards, and window frames.

Woodwork in a sentence

• He took an evening class in woodwork to learn how to build furniture.

• They repainted all the woodwork in the hallway a crisp white.

• The workshop smelled of sawdust from a weekend of woodwork.

• Damp had warped the woodwork around the bathroom window.

Where does woodwork come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent native English compound, built from two of the oldest words in the language. 'Wood' descends from Old English 'wudu', meaning the substance of trees or a stand of trees, and 'work' from Old English 'weorc', meaning labour or something made by labour; both are Germanic in origin and have close cousins across Dutch and German. Joined together, 'woodwork' came to describe the wooden parts of a building, such as doors, skirting, and window frames, and by extension the craft of shaping timber into objects. The compound is recorded in English from around the late seventeenth century, growing naturally out of everyday carpentry. Because each half is a plain, familiar word and the spelling simply stacks the two together with no joining letter, there is no hidden trap; the only thing to remember is that it is written as a single closed word, not as two.

How the word is built

• wood (timber)
• work (the working of a material)