Sunday Word: Deadfall

[sallymn]

deadfall [ded-fawl]

noun:
1 a trap so constructed that a weight (such as a heavy log) falls on an animal and kills or disables it
2 a mass of brush and fallen fall trees

(click to enlarge)
Examples:

Deadfall is a particularly thorny problem, and the club’s latter-day lumberjacks head out with chain saws in tow to remove trees upward of 4 feet in diameter. (Gregory Scruggs, 'Labor of love' motivates scrappy nordic ski club in North Cascades, The Seattle Times, December 2023)

The three sticks should be perfectly straight, and about the same diameter and length. Finger-thick and one-foot long will work for most deadfall triggers. (Tim MacWelch, A Guide to the 15 Best Survival Traps of All Time, Outdoor Life, October 2019)

If you happen to wander off trail on a hike, navigating over and under the debris, known as deadfall, proves to be a challenge in daylight, but imagine facing that challenge in the dark. (Meagan Thompson, Treasure hunter is rescued in the mountains south of Butte, KXLF, November 2025)

Winding roads diving deep between steep hillsides littered with jagged deadfall and boulder-size talus, towns few and far between. (C C Weiss, Review: Micro-camping the Idaho wilds in Escapod's monocoque teardrop, New Atlas, December 2024)

Then, a video demonstrating an ancient deadfall trap received over a million views. (Oliver Whang, Is There an Ethical Way to Kill Rats? Should We Even Ask?, New York Times, February 2023)

We hauled some deadfall from these woods to the center of the meadow where we built up around our camp a sort of circular fence. (David Zindell, The Lightstone)

Origin:
The earliest known use of the noun deadfall is in the late 1500s. OED's earliest evidence for deadfall is from before 1589, in the writing of Leonard Mascall, translator and author. (Oxford English Dictionary)