specifically: one made of tightly bundled reeds and used on Lake Titicaca
2
: a tropical American tree (Ochroma pyramidale synonym O. lagopus) of the silk-cotton family with extremely light strong wood used especially for floats
also: its wood
Example Sentences
Recent Examples on the WebIn reality, little balsa-wood sticks are fragile things, and the combination of phosphorous and potassium in the match head is prone to drying out and crumbling. Wes Siler, Outside Online, 3 Mar. 2017 Using balsa wood, Holliday replaced the parts of the coffins from which the bodies would need to burst and scored the wood for extra-easy breakage. Anne Victoria Clark, Vulture, 15 July 2021 Most likely your parents helped you fashion blocks of pine or balsa into a light, four-wheeled racer, usually about the width and length of an iPhone. Andrew Zaleski, Popular Science, 3 June 2020 Turbine blades typically have glass-fibre skins, balsa-wood cores and metal or carbon-fibre spars.The Economist, 28 May 2020 This superb and innovative balsa-wood plug has been around longer than most anglers who fish it. Bob Mcnally, Field & Stream, 22 May 2020 The Scatter Raps are made of balsa wood and are available in 14 colors.Field & Stream, 27 Dec. 2019 For the kitchen island, White assembled balsa wood into a simple table design, then painted it to look like marble veining. Hadley Keller, House Beautiful, 31 Dec. 2019 Outside of its optimal use cases, millimeter-wave’s fragility will probably leave it as the balsa wood of bandwidth solutions. Rob Pegoraro, Ars Technica, 4 Dec. 2019 See More