A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1190 entries
touchwood
Touchwood is decayed wood or fungal material dry enough and soft enough to take a spark and hold a smoldering ember. It is the same substance the American vocabulary calls punk and it was the working tinder of a great many households before matches, kept dry in a box with flint and steel and lit fresh each morning.
Etymology
The name is a plain compound and the first half is touch in the older sense of setting alight, which survives in the phrase about touching off an explosion and in touchpaper. English also had touchwood as a name for the <a href="https://rewilding.mx/word/tinder-fungus/" class="word-autolink">tinder fungus itself, so the material and its source shared the word.
Notes
It is one of the candidate origins for the expression about touching wood for luck, alongside older explanations involving trees and the spirits in them, and the connection has never been established either way. Touchwood that has been colonized by certain fungi also glows faintly in the dark, foxfire, so the same piece of wood could light your fire and shine in your pocket.