rubble
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
From Middle English rouble, rubel, robel, robeil, from Anglo-Norman *robel (“bits of broken stone”). Presumably related to rubbish, originally of same meaning (bits of stone).[1] Ultimately presumably from Proto-Germanic *raub- (“to break”), perhaps via Old French robe (English rob (“steal”)) in sense of “plunder, destroy”;[2] see also Middle English, Middle French -el.
Pronunciation[edit]
Noun[edit]
rubble (countable and uncountable, plural rubbles)
- The broken remains of an object, usually rock or masonry.
- 1975, Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift [Avon ed., 1976, p. 72]:
- The old boulevard now was a sagging ruin, waiting for the wreckers. … You'd have to loathe yourself vividly to be indifferent to such destruction or, worse, rejoice at the crushing of the locus of these middle-class settlements, glad that history had made rubble of them.
- 2013 June 29, “High and wet”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8842, page 28:
- Floods in northern India, mostly in the small state of Uttarakhand, have wrought disaster on an enormous scale. […] Rock-filled torrents smashed vehicles and homes, burying victims under rubble and sludge.
- 1975, Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift [Avon ed., 1976, p. 72]:
- (geology) A mass or stratum of fragments of rock lying under the alluvium and derived from the neighbouring rock.
- (Can we find and add a quotation of Lyell to this entry?)
- (Britain, dialect, in the plural) The whole of the bran of wheat before it is sorted into pollard, bran, etc.
- (Can we find and add a quotation of Simmonds to this entry?)
Derived terms[edit]
Related terms[edit]
Translations[edit]
the broken remains of an object, usually rock or masonry
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References[edit]
Anagrams[edit]
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