wooden

adjective wood·en \ ˈwu̇-dᵊn \

Updated on: 10 Dec 2017

Definition of wooden

1 : made or consisting of wood

2 : lacking ease or flexibility : awkwardly stiff

a wooden speech

a wooden performer

—

woodenly

adverb

—

woodenness

play \ˈwu̇-dᵊn-(n)əs\ noun

See wooden defined for English-language learners

See wooden defined for kids

wooden was our Word of the Day on 10/10/2015. Hear the podcast!

Examples of wooden in a Sentence

The guest speaker was wooden and uninspiring.
a movie with wooden dialogue

Recent Examples of wooden from the Web

Jeldness, who’d set a world record by ski jumping 92 feet at the age of 15 in his homeland, enthralled local townspeople hurtling down the hill on 10-foot long wooden skis with only a single leather strap to hold them in place.

— natalie obiko pearson, Bloomberg.com, "‘Fight the Man’ Ski Resort Leads Crowdfunding to Snub Vail," 1 Nov. 2017
Rubies + Diamonds Hollywood Patterned plates, smooth wooden coasters, and nitro flights would be enough to amp up anyone’s Instagram feed.

— brittany martin, Los Angeles Magazine, "L.A.’s Most Instagrammable Coffee Shops," 19 Sep. 2017
Settle in at one of the bar's long wooden tables and sip offerings like Funk Brewing's Silent Disco hazy IPA.

— rebecca aydin, chicagotribune.com, "Restaurant openings: Great Central Brewing Company, Pearl Brasserie," 5 Sep. 2017
There was nothing below but the wooden studs and a concrete floor.

— Philly.com, "Hurricane Maria inspires Philadelphia city council staffer to aid the land of her ancestors.," 5 Nov. 2017
Lighthouses sprouting in the haze, red wooden shacks in emerald green meadows and dramatically layered schist cliffs plunging into the water.

— sylvie bigar, miamiherald, "St. Lawrence is part tame river, part wild sea | Miami Herald," 4 Nov. 2017
The chapel’s wooden frame is loosening and its balcony is breaking away from the walls.

— brigit katz, Smithsonian, "Harriet Tubman’s Canadian Church Is Struggling to Survive," 4 Nov. 2017
Each night here on the border, hundreds of Rohingya keep arriving in fleets of wooden boats that float silently across the mouth of the Naf River, the brackish waterway that separates the two countries.

— jeffrey gettleman, New York Times, "Fate of Stateless Rohingya Muslims Is in Antagonistic Hands," 3 Nov. 2017
John Boos Cutting Board The best cutting boards are big and wooden, a combination that renders them as close to a butcher block workspace as possible.

— elaheh nozari, Bon Appetit, "The 4 Best Kitchen Products to Buy Online Right Now," 13 Oct. 2017

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'wooden.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Did You Know?

Humans have been making objects out of wood since before there even 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.