Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Loose fragments or grains that have been worn away from rock.
- noun Disintegrated or eroded matter; debris.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In pathology, caseous or other disorganized material formed by the destruction of living tissue.
- noun In geology, loose, uncompacted fragments of rock, either water-worn or angular.
- noun More comprehensively, any broken or comminuted, material worn away from a mass by attrition; any aggregate of loosened fragments or particles.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Geol.) A mass of substances worn off from solid bodies by attrition, and reduced to small portions.
- noun Hence: Any fragments separated from the body to which they belonged; any product of disintegration.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun countable pieces of
rock broken off byice ,glacier , orerosion . - noun biology Organic waste material from
decomposing dead plants or animals. - noun
debris orfragments ofdisintegrated material
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun loose material (stone fragments and silt etc) that is worn away from rocks
- noun the remains of something that has been destroyed or broken up
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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An adept hand with a pair of chopsticks is amazingly useful when removing a bit of random detritus from the garbage disposal.
An open letter to Albert Payson Terhune: matociquala 2008
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If you collected all the detritus from a 25 megaton bomb after the explosion, you would only be missing one kilogram of mass, and an average sized city.
365 tomorrows » 2007 » November : A New Free Flash Fiction SciFi Story Every Day 2007
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This wretched, self-serious, self-righteous, pointless bit of science fiction detritus is based on a short story universally acknowledged as a classic of the genre, "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Henry Kuttner and Katherine L. Moore.
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If you collected all the detritus from a 25 megaton bomb after the explosion, you would only be missing one kilogram of mass, and an average sized city.
365 tomorrows » One Thin Dime : A New Free Flash Fiction SciFi Story Every Day 2007
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Heap up a big mound of duff and detritus from the forest floor, then excavate a pocket that is large enough to crawl into.
Seven Primitive Survival Shelters That Could Save Your Life 2006
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AK: I love what you've done in populating your landscape with bits of detritus from the Blake iconography, like the vines from "Holy Thursday."
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It is an image of a sleek chrome bullet-train of genre dragging up dead leaves and detritus from the mainstream tracks as it rockets relentlessly forward.
Why Do I Infernokrush? Hal Duncan 2005
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"The dross overwhelms, the detritus is everywhere".
Archive 2004-05-23 Laban 2004
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"The dross overwhelms, the detritus is everywhere".
May 23, 2004 Laban 2004
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I’m suprised your desk gets buried in detritus, I thought you had Bunnies for that kind of thing.
tbtabby commented on the word detritus
A badass troll.
January 28, 2012
RevBrently commented on the word detritus
From Dave Eggers' "Zeitoun," p. 128: "The water was filthy now, streaked with oil and spotted with detritus."
August 4, 2012