Definition of "lightwood" [light•wood]

• Chiefly Southern U.S. See kindling. See Regional Note at kindling. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "This mill is constructed of two large flat wooden cylinders, formed like mill-stones, with channels or furrows cut therein, diverging in an oblique direction from the centre to the circumference, made of a heavy and exceedingly hard timber, called lightwood, which is the knots of the pitch pine."
• "A large platform, used for sunning wheat and seed cotton, was arranged by the negroes for their dance, and several wagon-loads of resinous pine -- known as lightwood -- were placed around about it in little heaps, so that the occasion might lack no element of brilliancy."
• "The floor was of the bare earth, covered in patches with loose plank of various descriptions, and littered over with billets of "lightwood," unwashed cooking utensils, two or three cheap stools, a pine settee -- made from the rough log and hewn smooth on the upper side -- a full-grown bloodhound, two younger canines, and nine half-clad juveniles of the flax-head species."