What is timber?

The difficulty now was to find timber of sufficient size for the construction of canoes, the trees in these high mountain regions being chiefly a scrubbed growth of pines and cedars, aspens, haws, and service-berries, and a small kind of cotton-tree, with a leaf resembling that of the willow. read more

And the spelling of timber was unsettled for many years; it was sometimes spelled tymmer, tymber, and, yes, timbre. The messy overlapping of these similar words is coincidental: the consequence of the intersection of the different cultures and languages that left their traces on English. read more

Old English timber "building, structure," later "building material, trees suitable for building," and "wood in general," from Proto-Germanic *temran (cf. Old Frisian timber "wood, building," Old High German zimbar "timber, wooden dwelling, room," Old Norse timbr "timber," German Zimmer "room"), from PIE *demrom-, from root *dem-/ *dom-"build" (source of Greek domos, Latin domus; see domestic (adj.)). read more