[1] The image of wood came to Latin as a calque from the ancient Greek philosophical usage of hyle (ὕλη).
Pythagoras of Samos, a mathematician, mystic, and scientist, taught that number, rather than matter, constitutes the true nature of things.
Socrates accepted (or at least did not reject) that list, as seen from Plato's Timaeus, which identified the five elements with the Platonic solids.
Earth was associated with the cube, air with the octahedron, water with the icosahedron, fire with the tetrahedron, and the heavens with the dodecahedron.
He conceived of matter as a passive possibility that something might be actualized by an active principle, a substantial form, giving it real existence.
This Islamic version of Aristotle eventually reached the University of Paris and the attention of scholastic philosophy, and the work of Thomas Aquinas.
Quantum physics and special relativity however, complicate the picture through the identification of matter and energy, particle and wave.