How to Use deadwood in a Sentence

deadwood

noun
  • She's determined to get the deadwood out of the company.
  • Wait to see if plants leaf out or re-sprout, then prune off deadwood.
    — Pam Peirce, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 Feb. 2018
  • Bit by bit, deadwood is decomposed, feeding new life along the way.
    — Katarina Zimmer, Smithsonian Magazine, 28 Feb. 2025
  • When removing any deadwood, cut just above the branch collar.
    — Gemma Johnstone, The Spruce, 18 Jan. 2026
  • At the same time, the kids are getting closer to the deadwood, even as the dagger fights against them.
    — Louis Peitzman, Vulture, 15 Dec. 2025
  • The lawsuit states that the branch fell from a tree that was clearly unhealthy, decayed and had deadwood.
    — Caleb Lunetta, San Diego Union-Tribune, 10 Nov. 2025
  • Flames along the ground eliminated deadwood, duff and grasses, yet spared trees.
    — AZCentral.com, 23 July 2019
  • If your maple is in poor health, make minimal cuts or limit yourself to deadwood removal.
    — oregonlive, 25 June 2023
  • The shears can cut everything from delicate stems to tough branches or deadwood.
    — Nor'adila Hepburn, Better Homes & Gardens, 16 May 2023
  • In the short term, Inter may try once more to streamline their squad, to shed some of the deadwood that was up for sale last summer.
    — Emmet Gates, Forbes, 6 Oct. 2021
  • To do will require some clearing of deadwood from Ernesto Valverde's title winning squad.
    — SI.com, 25 June 2018
  • Also stay clear of plants that produce fine, dry or dead leaves or needles, as well as those that accumulate deadwood within the plant.
    — oregonlive, 2 June 2021
  • There are also fears that the deadwood could fuel catastrophic wildfires.
    — Scott Smith, Orange County Register, 10 Jan. 2017
  • Everyone else is still around because United have failed to remove the rotting deadwood.
    — SI.com, 8 July 2019
  • He's made some good decisions in three tidy signings, and shipped out a fair bit of the deadwood to start United on their road to a total cleanse.
    — SI.com, 9 Oct. 2019
  • And some old-growth forests have abundant deadwood, both standing and on the ground, whereas others are kept largely clear of deadwood by frequent fires.
    — Reed Frederick Noss, The Conversation, 16 Apr. 2025
  • By then, the current deadwood will have dropped off the Yankees’ $216 million payroll.
    — Filip Bondy, New York Times, 5 Apr. 2016
  • What is even better the amount of money secured over deadwood, Carl Jenkinson for £3m?
    — SI.com, 11 Aug. 2019
  • The eating of bark kills trees — allowing sunny clearings for plants, and new homes for insects that live in deadwood, which are then sources of food for birds and other mammals.
    — Wyatte Grantham-Philips, USA TODAY, 11 July 2020
  • Shifting out expensive deadwood is more of an urgent priority.
    — SI.com, 30 Oct. 2019
  • With ghost Rich’s help, the kids sink the dagger into the ground beneath the deadwood, and the Pennywise bird is knocked back onto the ice by a beam of light.
    — Louis Peitzman, Vulture, 15 Dec. 2025
  • The freedom to cut deadwood is a competitive advantage for the Pack and contributed mightily to the past three decades of success.
    — Luther Ray Abel, National Review, 3 Aug. 2021
  • Another would be signing long-term contracts with companies to harvest deadwood from forests for commercial purposes.
    — Matt Canham, The Salt Lake Tribune, 18 June 2021
  • At Thursday’s performance, there was as much deadwood as virtuosity.
    — Charles McNultytheater Critic, Los Angeles Times, 18 July 2022
  • There were no concerning casualties for Barça during the summer, with the Catalans clearing out the deadwood in their squad.
    — SI.com, 13 Aug. 2019
  • When the coach arrived from Bayern Munich in 2016, there was a lot of deadwood hanging around the Etihad.
    — SI.com, 24 Oct. 2019
  • The arrival of the emerald ash borer has killed hundreds of trees in suburban Maryland, providing woodpeckers with deadwood and also loads of grubs to feed on.
    — Adrian Higgins, Washington Post, 17 July 2019
  • Arsenal will also be expected to be busy on the departures front, as the club prepares to offload deadwood, as well as send promising youngsters out on loan for more certainty on game time.
    — SI.com, 31 Jan. 2018
  • This cost-effective approach has helped Alaska largely avoid the problem, common in the lower 48 states, of forests that are overgrown or have too much deadwood.
    — Randi Jandt, Scientific American, 1 Oct. 2021
  • The wild mushrooms enjoy a symbiotic relationship with deadwood.
    — Midwest Living, 3 Apr. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'deadwood.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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