Types of wood

Woodworkers buy two kinds of wood: hardwoods from broadleaf trees and softwoods from conifers. This site has 70 hardwoods and26 softwoods, each with its hardness, weight, movement and uses from the USDA Wood Handbook.

Hardwood vs softwood

The names are botanical, not a measure of hardness. Hardwoods are angiosperms: their seeds grow inside the ovary of a flower, and their wood has vessels, open-ended cells stacked into tubes that carry sap (the pores you see in oak). In temperate regions they usually have broad leaves and most drop them in autumn. Softwoods are gymnosperms, mostly conifers: their seeds are not enclosed, their wood has no vessels, and most keep needle- or scale-like leaves all year, though larches and baldcypress drop theirs.

So some softwoods are harder than some hardwoods. The Handbook's own example: longleaf pine (870 lbf) is harder than basswood (410 lbf), Janka at 12% moisture content.

Charts

• Janka hardness chartJanka side hardness of every wood species here, hardest first, in lbf and N at 12% moisture content, from the USDA Wood Handbook. Sortable and printable.
• Wood density chartWhat every wood species here weighs at 12% moisture content, per cubic foot, cubic meter and board foot, worked from USDA Wood Handbook specific gravity.
• Wood shrinkage chartHow much each wood species shrinks and swells: tangential, radial and volumetric shrinkage from the USDA Wood Handbook, and what a 12 in board does.
• Wood dust and toxic woodsWhat IARC, OSHA, NIOSH and Germany's TRGS 907 sensitizer list say about wood dust and which wood species are listed, with no medical advice of our own.

Definitions adapted in our own words from the Wood Handbook, Chapter 2, p. 2-2.