A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
punky wood
Punky wood is timber that has been softened by fungal decay to the point where it crumbles under a thumbnail, holds water like a sponge, and has lost most of its strength. It is the state a log passes through on the way to becoming soil. Foresters and builders use the word as a fault; ecologists use it as a description of habitat, since punky wood is where a great deal of forest life is.
Etymology
The adjective is built on punk, meaning decayed wood used as tinder, and the two senses run together: Wood becomes punky before it is any use as punk. English has a set of words for the stages, including doty, dozy, foxed, and spalted, most of them from the timber trade and each naming a slightly different kind of failure.