bitterwood

1. 1.

   handsome South American shrub or small tree having bright scarlet flowers and yielding a valuable fine-grained yellowish wood; yields the bitter drug quassia from its wood and bark

   SynonymsquassiaQuassia amara

   Broaderbitterwood tree

   Part ofgenus Quassia
2. 2.

   West Indian tree yielding the drug Jamaica quassia

   SynonymsJamaica quassiaPicrasma excelsaPicrasma excelsum

   Broaderbitterwood tree

   Part ofPicrasma
3. 3.

   medium to large tree of tropical North and South America having odd-pinnate leaves and long panicles of small pale yellow flowers followed by scarlet fruits

   Synonymsparadise treeSimarouba glauca

   Broaderbitterwood tree

   Part ofSimarouba

Other forms of bitterwood

plural

bitterwoods·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about bitterwood

What does bitterwood mean?

bitterwood means "handsome South American shrub or small tree having bright scarlet flowers and yielding a valuable fine-grained yellowish wood; yields the bitter drug quassia from its wood and bark". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in bitterwood?

bitterwood has 3 syllables: bit-ter-wood. The stress falls on "bit".

What is another word for bitterwood?

Close synonyms include quassia, Quassia amara, Jamaica quassia, Picrasma excelsa, Picrasma excelsum. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is bitterwood a common word?

bitterwood is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.