Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A wooden peg that swells when wet and is used to fasten timbers, especially in shipbuilding.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A cylindrical pin of hard wood used for fastening planks or timbers in ships and similar constructions.
- noun In architecture, same as
gutta . 1.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Shipbuilding) A long wooden pin used in fastening the planks of a vessel to the timbers or to each other.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
wooden peg orpin used as a fastener.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a wooden peg that is used to fasten timbers in shipbuilding; water causes the peg to swell and hold the timbers fast
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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Tamarac hulls went sound for twenty years, and sometimes forty, especially when hardwood treenails were used -- a treenail being a bolt that did the service of a nail in woodwork or a rivet in steel plating.
All Afloat A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways William Charles Henry Wood 1905
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The Ship is almost compleated, and ready to come out of Dock, as she was only spiked and treeniled [treenail]; and to take in a load of Salt which is a weighty loading I thought propper to butt boalt her: I have used every Endevour to obtain Freight some way of other, but fruteless.
Collections 1792
chained_bear commented on the word treenail
"'Mr Lamb,' he said... 'here are your tools. Ply them like a hero ... You may have every man-jack you want to hold a plank or shape a treenail.'"
--Patrick O'Brian, The Far Side of the World, 402
February 23, 2008
hernesheir commented on the word treenail
A peg or dowel used since ancient times to fasten pieces of wood together, especially in timber frame construction and wooden shipbuilding. Cf. trenail and trunnel.
November 2, 2009