Types of Wood: Hardwoods, Softwoods and How to Choose

There are only two botanical types of wood, and sorting by them first makes everything else easier. The USDA Forest Products Laboratory defines softwoods as woods from gymnosperms, mostly conifers, whose seeds are not enclosed in the ovary of a flower, and hardwoods as woods from angiosperms, the flowering broadleaf trees. That is the whole definition. It says nothing about how hard the board is.

Everything a woodworker actually cares about - hardness, how much the board moves with humidity, how it takes stain, whether it rots outdoors - is measured species by species, and the spread inside each family is wider than the gap between them. So the practical order is: family, then species, then the published property you need.

The number everyone quotes is Janka side hardness: the force needed to press a 0.444-inch steel ball halfway into the wood. The USDA Wood Handbook publishes it for dozens of US species at 12% moisture content, and the range is huge.

• Quaking aspen 350 lbf, American basswood 410 lbf, eastern white pine 380 lbf
• Red maple 950 lbf, black cherry 950 lbf, black walnut 1,010 lbf
• Northern red oak 1,290 lbf, American beech 1,300 lbf, white ash 1,320 lbf
• White oak 1,360 lbf, sugar maple 1,450 lbf
• Shagbark hickory 1,880 lbf, pignut hickory 2,140 lbf

Notice the overlap that breaks the naming: longleaf pine, a softwood, comes in at 870 lbf, more than twice as hard as basswood, which is a hardwood.

Once a board is milled, the fastest visual sort is the pore pattern on the end grain. The Wood Handbook splits porous woods into two main patterns plus one in between.

• Ring-porous: big earlywood vessels form a visible ring, then the latewood goes dense and fibrous. Oaks, white ash, shagbark hickory and hackberry look like this, and it is why oak grain reads as coarse stripes.
• Diffuse-porous: vessels stay about the same size across the ring, so the surface looks even. Maple, birch, aspen, cottonwood and yellow-poplar are the common examples.
• Semi-ring-porous: an intermediate pattern; black walnut is the temperate example the handbook names.

Softwoods have no vessels at all - the handbook calls them nonporous - which is why pine end grain shows growth rings but no open pores. Our wood grain guide walks through the same check with a hand lens.

Wood swells and shrinks across the grain as humidity changes, and the published shrinkage values from green to ovendry tell you which species will fight you. Tangential shrinkage (the direction that matters most in a flatsawn board) from the Wood Handbook:

• White oak 10.5%, sugar maple 9.9%, northern red oak 8.6%
• Red maple 8.2%, black walnut 7.8%, black cherry 7.1%
• Western redcedar 5.0%, sugar pine 5.6%

Radial shrinkage is roughly half the tangential figure in most species - white oak is 5.6% radial against 10.5% tangential. That mismatch is why flatsawn boards cup and why quartersawn stock stays flatter. It is also why the handbook warns that every joint combining end grain with edge grain must be protected from moisture swings in service.

The Wood Handbook groups native species by heartwood decay resistance, and the groups are blunt. Very resistant: black locust, osage-orange, red mulberry, Pacific yew. Resistant: the white oak group, black walnut, chestnut, the cedars including eastern redcedar and western redcedar, old-growth redwood and old-growth baldcypress, sassafras, junipers, mesquite. Moderately resistant: Douglas-fir, honey locust, western larch, young-growth redwood, old-growth longleaf and slash pine.

Slightly or nonresistant - the long list that surprises people - includes all the maples, birches, hickories, ashes, beech, elm, sweetgum, sycamore, yellow-poplar, cottonwood, the true firs, hemlocks and spruces.

Two cautions the handbook adds itself: untreated sapwood of essentially every species has low resistance, so only heartwood counts, and ratings drop further in ground contact or in warm humid climates.

Two practical conventions trip up beginners. First, nominal sizes are not real sizes. The US Voluntary Product Standard PS 20-20 sets minimum dressed sizes: a nominal 2 inch thickness is 1-1/2 inches (38 mm) dry, a nominal 4 inch width is 3-1/2 inches (89 mm) dry, and a nominal 1 inch board is 3/4 inch. Green lumber is allowed to be slightly fatter, 1-9/16 inches for the same nominal 2 inch, because it will shrink in service.

Second, softwood framing lumber is a traded commodity and its price swings. NAHB reported the framing lumber composite at $515.93 per 1,000 board feet for 18 September 2026, citing the Madison's Lumber Price Index, up 8.4% from a year earlier. That figure is wholesale softwood framing stock, not the retail price of a hardwood board at a specialty yard - hardwood lumber is priced separately, by species and grade.

Work in this order and most boards give themselves up. Look at the end grain first for pores: open ring, even scattering, or no pores at all. Then weigh it in your hand against something you know. Then look at the face grain and the colour of the heartwood against the sapwood.

If the piece is finished, stained or veneered, the end grain is often the only honest surface left, so find a cut edge or the underside. With WoodLens you can photograph the grain and the app identifies the most likely species, which is a fast way to narrow a shortlist before you check the pores yourself. Our wood species directory has the per-species pages.

Hardness alone does not choose a board. This list adds specific gravity at 12% moisture (USDA Wood Handbook Table 5-3b), tangential shrinkage from green to ovendry (Table 4-3), and the 4/4 price per board foot at The Wood Yard in Concord, Georgia, from its list updated September 2026.

• Red oak - 0.63, 8.6%, $6.10
• White oak - 0.68, 10.5%, $10.00
• Hard (sugar) maple - 0.63, 9.9%, $8.35
• Soft (red) maple - 0.54, 8.2%, $8.25
• Black cherry - 0.50, 7.1%, $6.75
• Black walnut - 0.55, 7.8%, $16.50
• White ash - 0.60, 7.8%, $6.10
• Shagbark hickory - 0.72, 10.5%, $6.00
• Yellow-poplar - 0.42, 8.2%, $5.35
• American basswood - 0.37, 9.3%, $5.95

Prices vary by region and yard; use them as a ranking. Our types of hardwood for furniture page turns this into choices by project.

"Strongest" can mean bending strength or hardness, and the USDA Wood Handbook ranks them differently.

• Bending strength (modulus of rupture at 12% moisture): among imports, ipe reaches 25,400 psi and courbaril 19,400 psi (Table 5-5b); among US species, shagbark hickory 20,200 psi, pignut hickory 20,100 psi, black locust 19,400 psi and mockernut hickory 19,200 psi (Table 5-3b).
• Side hardness: ipe 3,680 lbf, courbaril 2,350 lbf, pignut hickory 2,140 lbf, mockernut hickory 1,970 lbf and jarrah 1,910 lbf.
• Density: live oak is the heaviest US species in Table 5-3b, with a specific gravity of 0.88 at 12% moisture.

So the top five by hardness are ipe, courbaril (Brazilian cherry), pignut hickory, mockernut hickory and jarrah; by bending strength, ipe, shagbark hickory, pignut hickory, black locust and courbaril.

Wikipedia's list of woods, organised into softwoods, hardwoods and pseudowoods, and specialty dealer Cook Woods, which stocks more than 250 species, are good places to meet the unusual names. A few that people ask about, with their botanical names from Wikipedia's list:

• Lignum vitae (Guaiacum officinale), cocobolo (Dalbergia retusa), grenadilla or African blackwood (Dalbergia melanoxylon), kingwood (Dalbergia cearensis)
• Bloodwood (Brosimum rubescens), African padauk (Pterocarpus soyauxii), purpleheart (Peltogyne species)
• Wenge (Millettia laurentii), zingana or African zebrawood (Microberlinia brazzavillensis), gonçalo alves (Astronium species), gumbo limbo (Bursera simaruba)

Flooring and lumber sellers also use trade names that hide the botany. The wood sold as Brazilian cherry is jatobá, Hymenaea courbaril, which the USDA Wood Handbook lists as courbaril; see our Brazilian cherry page. When a name sounds like a familiar species with a country in front of it, look up the botanical name before comparing properties.

Some species on exotic lists cannot move freely across borders. According to The Wood Database's explainer on CITES, Brazilian rosewood (Dalbergia nigra) is on Appendix I, which covers finished products such as guitars, and since 2 January 2017 every other Dalbergia species, three bubinga species and kosso have been on Appendix II. These rules apply to international trade, not to owning the wood at home, and non-commercial finished items under 10 kilograms per shipment are exempt from the Appendix II rules. Friends of the Earth's Good Wood Guide, compiled in 1997, rates wenge as endangered and both Brazilian and African mahogany as vulnerable, and recommends reclaimed or locally grown FSC-certified wood.

Softwoods are woods from gymnosperms, mostly conifers - trees whose seeds are not enclosed in the ovary of a flower - and their wood has no vessels (pores). Wikipedia notes that pines, spruces, larches and Douglas-fir also carry resin canals in the wood. The USDA Wood Handbook's list of the main US softwoods by region shows which trees you will actually meet as lumber:

• West - Douglas-fir, the western true firs, western and mountain hemlock, incense-cedar, western larch, lodgepole, ponderosa, sugar and western white pine, Port-Orford-cedar, western redcedar, redwood, Engelmann and Sitka spruce, and yellow-cedar.
• North and Appalachia - northern white-cedar, balsam fir, eastern hemlock, eastern white pine, jack pine, red pine, eastern redcedar, the eastern spruces and tamarack.
• South - baldcypress, Atlantic white-cedar, Fraser fir, the southern pines and eastern redcedar.

Worldwide, Wikipedia puts softwood at about 70% of annual lumber production, with the US, Canada, Russia, China, Germany and Scandinavia among the main producers. Our wood species directory has pages for eastern white pine, southern yellow pine, ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, western red cedar, eastern red cedar, redwood and Sitka spruce.

The USDA Wood Handbook's Table 5-3b gives clear-wood properties at 12% moisture content, and it answers these questions directly.

• Strongest in bending (modulus of rupture): slash pine 16,300 psi, longleaf pine 14,500 psi, interior north Douglas-fir 13,100 psi, shortleaf pine 13,100 psi, western larch 13,000 psi, loblolly pine 12,800 psi, coast Douglas-fir 12,400 psi.
• Stiffest: longleaf and slash pine 1.98 million psi, coast Douglas-fir 1.95 million psi.
• Hardest (side hardness): longleaf pine 870 lbf, western larch 830 lbf, Virginia pine 740 lbf, coast Douglas-fir 710 lbf, loblolly and shortleaf pine 690 lbf.
• Softest: northern white-cedar 320 lbf, Atlantic white-cedar, western redcedar and subalpine fir 350 lbf, eastern white pine, sugar pine and balsam fir 380 lbf.

Northern white-cedar is the softest wood in the whole table, softer than any hardwood listed - quaking aspen and black cottonwood are 350 lbf and basswood 410 lbf. Balsa, a hardwood, is not in the US table; Duffield Timber gives balsa at 160 kg/m3 against 670 kg/m3 for yew, a softwood, and Wikipedia names yew, longleaf pine and Douglas-fir as softwoods much harder than several hardwoods.

• Dents more easily - the hardest common softwood, longleaf pine at 870 lbf, is still below black cherry (950 lbf) and far below white oak (1,360 lbf) and sugar maple (1,450 lbf), which matters for floors and tabletops.
• Most are not decay resistant - the handbook puts the spruces, true firs, hemlocks and most pines in the slightly or nonresistant group, so outdoors they need preservative treatment. The exceptions are the cedars, old-growth redwood and baldcypress (resistant) and Douglas-fir, western larch and young-growth redwood (moderately resistant).
• Extractives - water-soluble extractives in redwood and western redcedar can bleed through paint; the handbook recommends stain-blocking primers on those woods.
• Uneven stain - strong earlywood-latewood contrast makes pine take stain unevenly; see our types of stain for wood page.

The upside, according to Duffield Timber, is speed of supply: softwoods are usually ready to harvest in around 40 years against up to 150 years for some hardwoods, and softwood is generally the less expensive of the two; it is also what framing lumber and most fence boards are made of - see wood frame construction and types of wood fences.