DETRITUS • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Detritus

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/dɪtrˈaɪtəs/ /dˈɛtrətəs/ Listen

Detritus

noun

The remains of something that has been destroyed or broken up. Synonyms: debris, dust, junk, rubble.

Loose material (stone fragments and silt etc) that is worn away from rocks.

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Etymology of 'Detritus'

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"Detritus" Quotes from Famous Books

... great chain, or the lower peaks of the minor one, combine into ever growing streams of pleasant waters which finally unite in the sluggish but impressive Po. Melting snows and torrential rains fill these watercourses with the rich detritus of the hills which renews from year to year the soil it originally created. A genial climate and a grateful soil return to the industrious inhabitants an ample reward for their labors. In the fiercest heats of summer the passing traveler, if he pauses, will hear the soft ...

— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... did not prevent a crowd of patrons, wild at the idea of having drunk the saline water, from leaving before the end of the day; those worst afflicted with gout and gravel consoled themselves. But the overflow continuing, all the rubbish, slime, and detritus which the cavern contained was disgorged on the following days; a veritable bone-yard came down from the mountain: skeletons of animals of every kind—of quadrupeds, birds, and reptiles—in short, all that one could conceive as ...

— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne

... are intact, but in which the roof has fallen in causing a dip in the ground not unlike the top of a tomb-shaft. The cemetery lies in a shoal in the dry stream-bed, at whose mouth El Kab was placed. This shoal is a great bank of gravel and a fine clay-like detritus, the beds of which lie alternately, the thickness of each varying in different parts. The practice in the XIIth dynasty was to sink the tomb-shaft until a layer of gravel was reached sufficiently strong for a chamber ...

— El Kab • J.E. Quibell

... this gravel in the way described seems to indicate that the ditch was built along the slope of a low hill forming the edge of the bottom land at that time, and that subsequently detritus was deposited above it and over the adjacent bottom land forming a smooth ground surface. Against this hypothesis it must be stated that no evidence whatever was found of more than a single deposit of sandy loam, although the exposures ...

— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff

... that more water pours into the ocean through the Congo's mouth, which is six miles wide, than from all the other rivers in Africa together. It is second among the world's rivers, and the dark detritus it carries to the Atlantic has been distinctly traced on the ocean bed for six hundred miles from the land. Some geographers still believed thirty years ago that all the waters of its upper basin might be tributary to the Nile. Map-makers ...

— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

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