debris
/dəˈbɹiː/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.92 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "His neighbors were still ripping out debris. But Mr. Ryan, a retired bricklayer who built his house by hand 30 years ago only to lose most of it to Hurricane Sandy, was already hard at work rebuilding."
- "But signalman Bridges was never to answer driver Gimbert's desperate question. A deafening, massive blast blew the wagon to shreds, the 44 high-explosive bombs exploding like simultaneous hits from the aircraft they should have been dropped from. The station was instantly reduced to bits of debris, and the line to a huge crater."
- "Melissa Foley clears debris in her neighborhood as the San Lorenzo River rises in Felton on Saturday, January 14."
- "[The researchers] noticed many of their pieces of [plastic marine] debris sported surface pits around two microns across. Such pits are about the size of a bacterial cell. Closer examination showed that some of these pits did, indeed, contain bacteria, […]."
Etymology
Borrowed from French débris, itself from dé- (“de-”) + bris (“broken, crumbled”), or from Middle French debriser (“to break apart”), from Old French debrisier, itself from de- + brisier (“to break apart, shatter, bust”), from Frankish *bristijan, *bristan, *brestan (“to break violently, shatter, bust”), from Proto-Germanic *brestaną (“to break, burst”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰrest- (“to separate, burst”). Cognate with Old High German bristan (“to break asunder, burst”), Old English berstan (“to break, shatter, burst”), German bersten (“to burst”). More at burst.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: debriser, debrisier, *bristijan, *brestaną, *bʰrest-
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /dəˈbɹiː/
- British English: /ˈdɛbɹi/