Lignum vitae wood can also be used to brew a tea. Other names for lignum vitae include palo santo (Spanish for "holy wood") Aura palo santo and "bastard greenheart" (not to be confused with true greenheart "Chlorocardium rodiei", a popular wood in shipbuilding, cabinetry, and woodturning but a completely different timber). Lignum vitae is also one of the numerous hard, dense woods loosely referred to as "ironwood". Lignum vitae is hard and durable, and is also the densest wood traded (density: 1.23 g/cm); it will easily sink in water. On the Janka Scale of Hardness, which measures hardness of woods, lignum vitae
Carlo Janka won the gold medal in giant slalom and the bronze in downhill at the 2009 World Championships in Val d'Isère. On the weekend of 4–6 December, 2009, Janka achieved a remarkable feat by winning the super-combined, downhill, and giant slalom on the challenging "Birds of Prey" course at Beaver Creek, Colorado. Janka was the first skier to win three World Cup races in a single weekend since Hermann Maier at the same location ten years earlier on the 2000 World Cup tour. On the same weekend as Janka triumphed in Beaver Creek, Lindsey Vonn almost duplicated the feat on the