Plywood is a manufactured wood panel made from thin sheets of wood veneer. It is one of the most widely used wood product. It is flexible, inexpensive, workable, and re-usable, and usually can be manufactured locally. Plywood is used instead of plain wood because of plywood's resistance to cracking, shrinkage, splitting, and twisting/warping, and because of its generally high strength. Plywood layers (called veneers) are glued together, with adjacent plies having their wood grain at right angles to each other, to form a composite material. This alternation of the grain is called cross-graining and has several important benefits: it reduces the tendency of wood to split when nailed at the edges; it reduces expansion and shrinkage, providing improved dimensional stability; and it makes the strength of the panel consistent across both directions.

Plywood is a manufactured wood panel made from thin sheets of wood veneer. It is one of the most widely used wood product. It is flexible, inexpensive, workable, and re-usable, and usually can be manufactured locally. Plywood is used instead of plain wood because of plywood's resistance to cracking, shrinkage, splitting, and twisting/warping, and because of its generally high strength. Plywood layers (called veneers) are glued together, with adjacent plies having their wood grain at right angles to each other, to form a composite material. This alternation of the grain is called cross-graining and has several important benefits: it reduces the tendency of wood to split when nailed at the edges; it reduces expansion and shrinkage, providing improved dimensional stability; and it makes the strength of the panel consistent across both directions.