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/dɪtrˈaɪtəs/ /dˈɛtrətəs/ Listen

noun

Detritus n.

(Geol.) A mass of substances worn off from solid bodies by attrition, and reduced to small portions; as, diluvial detritus. Note: For large portions, the word débris is used.

Hence: Any fragments separated from the body to which they belonged; any product of disintegration. "The mass of detritus of which modern languages are composed."

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Etymology of 'Detritus'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Detritus" Quotes from Famous Books

... lies I do not know. It is down there somewhere where it cooled into bathylithic crust back in the gray dawn of time when the earth was made. There it is part of the same ledge of which Scituate and Cohasset are built. All above that is terminal moraine, rock detritus piled upon rock foundation by the glacier. Plymouth Rock itself thus came joy riding from some ledge up Boston way, alighting from this first and greatest New England Transportation System only a few hundred thousand years before Mary Chilton arrived ...

— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... 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. ...

— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... significance lies in her promise. Faithful to her original vision, she has moved steadily onward, growing, writing no book like its predecessor, applying her wisdom continually to new knowledge, leaving behind her a rich detritus which she will perhaps be willing to consider detritus if it helps to nourish ...

— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... ankle-deep in mud. Notwithstanding the forbidding weather and bad road, we labored up the deep ravine on the sides of which the excavations are made. Dark peaks frowned above us capped with clouds and snow; white patches midway the sides showed the veins of the marble, and immense heaps of detritus, the accumulation of ages, mountains themselves, sloped down on each side like masses of piled ice to the very edge of the road. The road itself, white with the material of which it is made, was composed of loose pieces of the white marble of every size.... ...

— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse

... the same as in those far-distant epochs of the world's history when a more exuberant vegetation prevailed, if not a more abounding animal life. The same persistent, ever-acting law of vital development and growth has been present, in all conditions and circumstances of matter, ever since the detritus of the silicious rocks felt the first influence of the rains, the dews, and the sunlight. Then the earth commenced "to bring forth the grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-trees yielding fruit, after his kind;" and ...

— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

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