Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of various Australian trees in the genera Casuarina or Allocasuarina.
  • noun The wood of one of these trees.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Beer made in Australia or other English colonies.
  • noun One of various shrubs and trees of the peculiar, chiefly Australian, genus Casuarina.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun any of several Australian trees of the genus Casuarina

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From she (probably originally applied in a disparaging sense, because its wood resembles true oak when finished but was sometimes considered more difficult to work).]

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Examples

  • Toby: it's the one called "she-oak" though that term is not in colloquial usage in Hawaii.

    languagehat.com: HACKMATACK. 2005

  • They had chummed together on the seventy-odd-mile tramp from Melbourne; had boiled a common billy and slept side by side in rain-soaked blankets, under the scanty hair of a she-oak.

    Australia Felix 2003

  • Casuarina equisetifolia (she-oak) Avicennia officinalis (white mangrove).

    Tropic Days 2003

  • Here and there stood a solitary she-oak, most doleful of trees, its scraggy, pine-needle foliage bleached to grey.

    Australia Felix 2003

  • Known as swamp she-oak in its native Australia, Casuarina glauca grows in difficult, saline sites inhospitable to many other trees.

    Chapter 20 1990

  • I recrossed Batman's Creek, and travelled over thinly-timbered country of box, gum, wattle, and she-oak, with grass three of four feet high.

    A Source Book of Australian History Gwendolen H. [Compiler] Swinburne

  • The tree there resembles our common mountain fir: it is exactly like it in the bark; but it is called by the settlers, _the she-oak_.

    Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 Various

  • Near the head of the river, on the point, was a plantation of she-oak.

    A Source Book of Australian History Gwendolen H. [Compiler] Swinburne

  • I say, Joan, you remember the old Eight Mile Water-hole on Dingo Flat – middle of the patch of flooded gum and she-oak – that the Blacks used to say had no bottom to it?

    Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land 1915

  • When the wattle-blooms are drooping in the sombre she-oak glade,

    The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses 1916

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