A type of hardwood from tropical trees, valued for furniture-making and decorative woodwork.
From Sanskrit or Tamil origins, likely borrowed through Portuguese or Dutch traders who encountered the wood in tropical Asian regions. The term appears in accounts of colonial trade and woodworking from the 16th-18th centuries.
Colonial traders gave different names to tropical woods they encountered, and many of these names persist in specialty woodworking—calamandar represents the vocabulary of global trade that shaped which woods became famous in Europe!
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