Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Goods floating on the surface of a body of water after a shipwreck or after being cast overboard to lighten the ship.
- noun Discarded or unimportant things.
- noun People who are considered to be worthless or to have been rejected by society.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Such part of the wreck of a ship and its cargo as is found floating. See
jetsam .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Law) Goods lost by shipwreck, and floating on the sea; -- in distinction from
jetsam orjetson .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun
Debris floating in ariver orsea , in particular fragments from ashipwreck .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the floating wreckage of a ship
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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Rourke describes its dark banks well: its trolley-littered bed, its murky depths, its surface covered in flotsam and streaks of oily pollution.
Not the Booker prize: The Canal by Lee Rourke Sam Jordison 2010
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Frenchman — a trifle of flotsam from a mid-ocean wreck and landed to grow up among the farmer-sailormen of the coast of Maine.
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a Frenchman — a trifle of flotsam from a mid-ocean wreck and landed to grow up among the farmer-sailormen of the coast of Maine.
CHAPTER XVIII 2010
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But missed in the economic floodwaters among the flotsam was the waterlogged performance of Wal-Mart.
The Unraveling 2007
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There were deserters and rejects from the American army, one or two curious fragments of human flotsam from the Spanish Civil War, and the first American negro Raymond had known, a huge, clever man, rumoured to be a lawyer from West Virginia.
Overlord D-Day And The Battle for Normandy Max Hastings 1984
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There were deserters and rejects from the American army, one or two curious fragments of human flotsam from the Spanish Civil War, and the first American negro Raymond had known, a huge, clever man, rumoured to be a lawyer from West Virginia.
Overlord D-Day And The Battle for Normandy Max Hastings 1984
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There were deserters and rejects from the American army, one or two curious fragments of human flotsam from the Spanish Civil War, and the first American negro Raymond had known, a huge, clever man, rumoured to be a lawyer from West Virginia.
Overlord D-Day And The Battle for Normandy Max Hastings 1984
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There were deserters and rejects from the American army, one or two curious fragments of human flotsam from the Spanish Civil War, and the first American negro Raymond had known, a huge, clever man, rumoured to be a lawyer from West Virginia.
Overlord D-Day And The Battle for Normandy Max Hastings 1984
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Our flotsam was a trick of the fading light on the sea, just where Broken Rocks raised the swell a little; but in the exquisite, the almost menacing, calm of the evening, we leaned on our oars and watched for a while.
A Poor Man's House Stephen Sydney Reynolds 1900
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In addition to this flotsam, which is found in large masses in every big city, the militia which I mentioned consists of many adherents of an international European republic.
The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 10 Prince Otto Von Bismarck, Count Helmuth Von Moltke, Ferdinand Lassalle Kuno Francke 1892
chained_bear commented on the word flotsam
This is one strange-looking word.
October 29, 2007
aequoria commented on the word flotsam
Solar flotsam.
March 2, 2009
dharma66 commented on the word flotsam
flotsam and jetsam; the floating debris jettisoned from spacecraft
August 10, 2011