wooden
adjective
Simple meaning
As if made of wood.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
wuuduhnSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈwʊdən
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
adjective
figuratively
As if made of wood; moving awkwardly, or speaking with dull lack of emotion.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
This meaning: As if made of wood; moving awkwardly, or speaking with dull lack of emotion.
Used this way, wooden is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- No strong connotation
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use wooden
- “On a recent windy day, hundreds of visitors climbed wooden stairs to take pictures in front of the glacier.”adjective
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A prosthesis that replaces a missing leg.
A shoe carved from a single block of wood.
A large hollow wooden figure of a horse (filled with Greek soldiers) left by the Greeks outside Troy during the Trojan War.
A booby prize consisting of a spoon made of wood.
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Words can change meaning depending on context.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.