Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Any of several North American trees, especially the tamarack.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The American larch, Larix Americana: called
tamarack in the northwestern lumber-regions. Seelarch . Sometimeshackmetack . - noun The juniper, Juniperus communis.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Bot.) The American larch (
Larix Americana ), a coniferous tree with slender deciduous leaves; also, its heavy, close-grained timber. Called alsotamarack .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A larch, a tree of the species Larix laricina.
- noun nonstandard A balsam poplar, a tree of the species Populus balsamifera.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun poplar of northeastern North America with broad heart-shaped leaves
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Dad said the hackmatack was a native name for the tamarack (American, or black, larch (Larix laricina)), the roots of which were commonly used to make ships' knees (a piece used to fasten keel to hull, I believe, which had to be very strong).
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Hortus Third lists two distinct specific epithets for "hackmatack": Populus balsamifera, a member of the Salix (willow) family; and Larix laricina, of the Pinaeceae (pine family).
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That said, I can testify as a native speaker of northern Maine-ese that in Piscataquis County in the 1970s, "hackmatack" clearly referred both to the tamarack notable, according to my sixth-grade science teacher, for being the only deciduous needleleaf tree and for a kind of poplar-ish tree that was also popularly known as "popple," technically the quaking aspen.
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Grieve shows "hackmatack" as a synonym for yet another tree, the "yellow cedar", listed under Thuja occidentalis (Linn.), of the (now-outdated) Natural Order Coniferae.
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Spelling of 'hackmatack' standardised to ensure consistency with other uses
Acadia or, A Month with the Blue Noses Frederic S. Cozzens
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Our deciduous evergreens tamaracks, also called larch and hackmatack are filling in with fresh bright needles, some white water-flower was blooming spikes out in the bog, and white lady-slipper orchids bloomed right at the edge of the road.
Tuesday no-roadkill report jhetley 2007
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Could it be that tacamahac (Populus) and hackmatack (Larix) got confused (the words, not the trees)?
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Having spent considerable time in New England, I was always aware of those conifers commonly referred to as "larches", and I always thought a hackmatack tree was some sort of larch, hackmatack being a corruption of a Wampanoag or Massachusett word.
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A competitive googling produced 755 hits for "hackmatack, larix" and only 342 for "hackmatack, populus," but that's not exactly a scientific way of deciding the matter.
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Common names for P. balsamifera include balsam poplar, hackmatack, and tacamahac; common names for L. laricina include American larch, tamarack, hackmatack, and black larch.
reesetee commented on the word hackmatack
Balsam poplar; variants are hackmetack and tacamahac. Thought to derive from Western Abenaki language, it originally referred to a forest of tamarack and other conifers.
July 12, 2007
itz_chucknorris commented on the word hackmatack
wow this word is salubrius
July 31, 2010