matchwood

match +‎ wood

matchwood (countable and uncountable, plural matchwoods)

1. wood, often in the form of splinters, suitable for making matches
   • 1933, George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, Chapter 1,

     The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs.

   • 1952, C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Collins, 1998, Chapter 8,

     The brute had made a loop of itself round the Dawn Treader and was beginning to draw the loop tight. When it got quite tight—snap!—there would be floating matchwood where the ship had been and it could pick them out of the water one by one.

   • 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 3, translated by Harry Willetts, Harper & Row, Part V, Chapter 2, p. 49,

     The prison at Omsk, which had known Dostoyevsky, was not like any old Gulag transit prison, hastily knocked together from matchwood.

• doomwatch