matchwood

plural matchwoods

1. countableuncountableWood, often in the form of splinters, suitable for making matches.

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

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

   4 more examples

   The great stick was torn from his grasp and broken in two as though it had been matchwood, to be flung aside as the now infuriated beast charged for his adversary’s throat.

   1913, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan, New York: Ballantine Books, published 1963, page 45

   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.

   1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter I, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], →OCLC

   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.

   1952, C. S. Lewis, chapter 8, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Collins, published 1998

   They noted: "The crashworthiness of the early carriage was of a low standard. By the end of the 19th century, the continuous automatic brake and the absolute block system had greatly reduced the accident rate, but the accidents that did occur often reduced the wood vehicles to matchwood."

   2020 October 7, Philip Haigh, “From Southall to Carmont... how to keep passengers safe”, in Rail, page 46