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Excavate   Listen
verb
Excavate  v. t.  (past & past part. excavated; pres. part. excavating)  
1.
To hollow out; to form cavity or hole in; to make hollow by cutting, scooping, or digging; as, to excavate a ball; to excavate the earth.
2.
To form by hollowing; to shape, as a cavity, or anything that is hollow; as, to excavate a canoe, a cellar, a channel.
3.
(Engin.) To dig out and remove, as earth. "The material excavated was usually sand."
Excavating pump, a kind of dredging apparatus for excavating under water, in which silt and loose material mixed with water are drawn up by a pump.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Excavate" Quotes from Famous Books



... scientific and moneyed men. The required assessment work was done and a patent for the land obtained from the government. The object of the enterprise is for a double purpose, if possible to solve the mystery of the mountain, and if successful in finding the "hypothetic buried star" to excavate and appropriate it ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk

... of the mine still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by the pick of the workman who toiled to excavate them. The space between each prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner's grave; and who can tell what each of these graves has cost, in tears, in privations, in unspeakable wretchedness to the family who depended on the scanty wage of the worker cut off ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... strawberry, a perfect mountain of a strawberry. Its cool and shining sides seemed very attractive to a thirsty Soul. A red man, dressed strangely in the feathers of a raven, stood hard by, and loudly invited all passers-by to partake of this refreshment. I was about to excavate a portion of the monstrous strawberry (being partial to that fruit), when my guide held my hand and whispered in a low voice that they who accepted the invitation of the man that guarded the strawberry ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang

... manners and customs of the gang are to build shanties or "hunkies," hunt with sling shots, build fires before huts in the woods, cook their squirrels and other game, play Indian, build tree-platforms, where they smoke or troop about some leader, who may have an old revolver. They find or excavate caves, or perhaps roof them over; the barn is a blockhouse or a battleship. In the early teens boys begin to use frozen snowballs or put pebbles in them, or perhaps have stone-fights between gangs than which no contiguous African tribes could be more hostile. They become toughs and tantalize policemen ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... from the village told me that hardly an hour's walk from there was a place in the woods among the mountains where an enormous quantity of bones were piled up in the sand and gravel. Ha! I exclaimed, the day is beginning to break. I went out there with a few peasants, had them excavate a little, and, behold! we came across bones to my heart's content. So that is the place where Germanicus had the remnants of the Roman legions buried six years after the battle of Teutoburg Wood, when he directed his last expeditions against Hermann. And I ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... irrigators, great workers in delicate metal, stone, marble, and precious gems (there is no wood to speak of); great sculptors and decorators of the beautiful caves, so fancifully and so intricately connected, in which they live, and which have taken thousands of years to design and excavate and ventilate and adorn, and which they warm and light up at will in a beautiful manner by means of the ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... upon the success achieved by the underground railway of London. There are several plans proposed for an underground road. The first is known as the Arcade Railway. It is proposed by the friends of this plan to excavate the streets along which it passes to a depth of about twenty feet, or in other words, to make a new street twenty feet below the level of those already in existence. This new street is to be provided with sidewalks, gas-lamps, telegraph ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... who go into the wilds and do first-class work encounter every kind of risk and undergo every kind of hardship and exertion. Explorers and naturalists of the right type have open to them in South America a field of extraordinary attraction and difficulty. But to excavate ruins that have already long been known, to visit out-of-the-way towns that date from colonial days, to traverse old, even if uncomfortable, routes of travel, or to ascend or descend highway rivers like the Amazon, the Paraguay, and the ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... be tested by experiment. Following the example of Mr. Tegetmeier, I separated two combs, and put between them a long, thick, rectangular strip of wax: the bees instantly began to excavate minute circular pits in it; and as they deepened these little pits, they made them wider and wider until they were converted into shallow basins, appearing to the eye perfectly true or parts of a sphere, and of about the diameter of a ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... down in the slate, of course) is a still finer streak—a streak as fine as a pencil mark; and indeed, that is its name Pencil Mark. Whenever you find the Pencil Mark you know that thirty feet from it is the Indicator; you measure the distance, excavate, find the Indicator, trace it straight to the reef, and sink your shaft; your fortune is made, for certain. If that is true, it is curious. And ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... learned from the hillside spring which, welling up through strata of sand and gravel, comes out pure and clear and sparkling. To make spring water out of lake water, therefore, it is merely necessary to excavate a considerable area to the desired depth and lead into it the pipes connected with the wells from which water is to be pumped. Then the pit is filled with successive layers of crushed stone graduated ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... egg which the parent May-fly drops into the water, a six-legged grub is very soon hatched. This grub proceeds forthwith to excavate for himself a home in the soft bank of the river, below the surface of the water, and there remains for two long years, feeding upon the decaying matters of the mould. During this aquatic residence, the little creature finds it necessary to breathe; and that he may do so ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various

... chance of either." I replied. "My idea is this. The inside of the inclosure is already deep under a frozen drift, and from the look of the weather there will be more snow in plenty within a few hours. We will excavate a tunnel beneath it, starting from one of the little windows that give air to the cellar, and leading to some part of the south stockade. Then in a day or two, when the night is dark and other conditions favorable, what is to prevent us from making ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon

... diminish in frequency and violence. And then came to the ranch where he lodged and boarded an expedition from an eastern museum. It was an expedition sent to explore the near-by canyon for trace of the ancient "cliff dwellers," to find and, if need be, excavate the villages of this strange people and to do research work among them. The expedition was in charge of an eminent scientist. Galusha met and talked with the scientist and liked him at once, a liking which was to grow into adoration as the acquaintanceship between the two ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... in which it could be directly applied. The kinetic energy of the water had first to be changed into the potential energy of air under pressure, then, in that form, by suitable mechanism, it was used with signal success to disintegrate and excavate the hard rock of the tunnels. The energy resulting from combustion is also incapable of being directly transformed into useful motive power; it must first be converted into potential force of steam or air at high temperature and pressure, and then applied by means of suitable ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various

... Mann, of a person who spent a fortune in mining for coal, when a work on geology, which would have cost but a dollar, and might have been read in a week, would have informed him that the stratum where he began to excavate belonged to a formation lower down in the natural series than coal ever is, or, according to the constitution of things, ever can be found. He therefore worked into a stratum which must have been formed before a particle of coal, or even a ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... distress. Beside her was a pink pig she had been commissioned to escort down to the farm of Sant' Elia. This beast was suffering hellish torments from the heat and vainly endeavouring, with frenzied grunts of despair, to excavate for itself a hollow in the earth under a thinly clothed myrtle bush. I told the woman of shade lower down. She said she knew about it, but the pig—the pig refused to move! It had been engaged upon this hopeless occupation, without a moment's respite, for ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... malignant sores or ulcers on any part of the body, the doctors treated them by applying dirt or earth, and in warm weather would excavate a place in the ground and put the patient in it, either in a sitting or recumbent position, as the nature of the case required, and cover the affected part with earth for several hours, daily. Sometimes, by this mode of treatment, wonderful ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark

... convenient to employ me as a tub to the whale, and, having first excited the insular jealousy against archaeological intrusion by foreigners, and inducing his clique of subordinate intriguers to oppose my operations, though the Christian population in general were in favor of permitting me to excavate wherever I liked, he made them the concession of refusing me the permission I sought. Therefore, while he promised me all things and urged me to go at once to select my locality, he wrote to the Porte advising the refusal of the firman, which had been ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman

... postuli. Exact (precise) preciza. Exact gxusta. Exact, accurate akurata. Exactness akurateco. Exaggerate trograndigi. Exaggeration trograndigo. Exalt lauxdegi. Examination ekzameno. Examine ekzameni. Example ekzemplo. Exasperate koleregigi. Excavate kavigi. Excavate kavigi, fosi. Excavator terfosisto. Exceed superi. Excel superi. Excellence boneco. Excellency Ekscelenco, Mosxto. Excellent bonega. Except krom. Except escepti. Exception escepto. Excess malmodereco. Excessive troa. Excessively troe. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... moraines, erratic blocks, striated rock-surfaces, or other traces of a past ice-age. Many signs, on the other hand, indicate that during a not very remote geological period glaciers covered considerable areas of the opposite Asiatic shore, and contributed to excavate the fjords there—Kolyutschin Bay, St. Lawrence Bay, Metschigme ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold



Words linked to "Excavate" :   dig, nuzzle, hollow out, grub up, unearth, uncover, turn up, unveil, ditch, remove, excavation, grub out, dig out, exhume, locate, withdraw, take away



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