"driftwood" is a correct and usable word in written English.
You can use it to refer to pieces of wood that have been cast ashore by the waves and tide. For example, "We gathered some driftwood and built a small bonfire on the beach."
Just over the hill is Apple Bay, surfing spot and home of Bomba Shack, a driftwood bar (so ramshackle it's often hastily rebuilt after high winds) attracting locals, and a smattering of Americans, with home-grown live music and "special shack tea" - the latter, best avoided I fear, lest one misses departure date.
The BBC's new docu-drama series, Armada, opened last night with visual reenactments of all the hoary tropes of Elizabethan storytelling: a beleaguered isle, led by a vacillating queen; plucky English sailors knocking together a flotilla from the few planks of driftwood and some Vaseline; wordless, faceless Spaniards, bearing down with dark crucifixes upon their captives as instruments of torture.
The driftwood she found on the shore, 'u'l, acquired a different name if it had a proper shape and was not a broken, tangled mass.
Amid the flimsy shacks of driftwood and plastic stand new houses, a nearly finished children's nursery and the first timbers of a community workshop.
One year, a full-size horse made of driftwood stood in an orchard clearing among short grass and spring bulbs.
But most of the men were left in the water clinging to driftwood until, a few days later, a ship saved 49 of the strong and the lucky.
The sour mood is informed instead by the contrast between rising aspirations and enduring hardships; by a growing sense of alienation from the state; and by the unease of anticipation as the end of an era inevitably looms ever closer.It is not surprising that Egyptians should feel rather like driftwood on the Nile, accelerating towards one of the great river's cataracts.
Stormier seas throw up driftwood: twisted, salt-scoured sculptures that become home to crabs and sandhoppers.
The adults are usually found on foliage or around flowers, whereas the larvae inhabit decaying wood, especially driftwood on beaches or riverbanks.
