Tamarack
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Any of several North American larches, of the genus Larix. countable, uncountable
"The women peeled tamarack bark for tea, dug through the deep snow in hopes of finding a few dried fiddleheads."
- 2 medium-sized larch of Canada and northern United States including Alaska having a broad conic crown and rust-brown scaly bark wordnet
- 3 Any of several North American larches, of the genus Larix.; especially, Larix laricina countable, uncountable
- 4 Wood from such a tree. countable, uncountable
Example
More examples"The women peeled tamarack bark for tea, dug through the deep snow in hopes of finding a few dried fiddleheads."
Etymology
From Canadian French tamarac, believed to derive from an Algonquian word. In European languages there was contamination between tacamahac, from Nahuatl, and various Algonquian words containing the final Proto-Algonquian *-a·xkw- (“hardwood or deciduous tree”), including the sources of tamarack and hackmatack, as was already recognized by Chamberlain 1902. This makes the precise Algonquian words involved difficult to recover.
Related phrases
More for "tamarack"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.