plywood

UK/ˈplaɪwʊd/US/ˈplaɪwʊd/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,932 of 15,258leans written

Plywood is a board made of thin wood layers glued crosswise. A sheet of plywood, marine plywood, cut the plywood.

The crossing is the whole trick: wood is strong along the grain and weak across it, so alternating the direction of each layer makes a board that is strong in both and will not split. There is always an odd number of layers, so the faces run the same way.

Definitions of plywood

1nounplywoodA board made of thin wood layers glued crosswise.B2+
“They nailed plywood over the windows before the storm arrived.”

plywood is a material.

Where it comes from

From ply + wood.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Materials & Substances

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plywood in the wild

All plywoods bind resin and wood fibre sheets (cellulose cells are long, strong and thin) to form a composite material.
Plywood
Smaller, thinner, and lower-quality plywoods may only have their plies (layers) arranged at right angles to each other.
Plywood
Before plywood became common, tongue-and-groove boards were also used for sheathing buildings and to construct concrete formwork.
Tongue and groove
For many uses, tongue-and-groove boards have been rendered obsolete by the introduction of plywood and later composite wood boards, but the method is still used in higher-quality boards.
Tongue and groove
The method is used to cover the exposed sides of materials such as plywood, particle board, or MDF.
Edge banding

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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