rubble
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 (waste material, bits of stone, rubble).[1] Ultimately presumably from Old Norse rubba (“to huddle, crowd together, heap up", possibly also "to rub, scrape”), from Proto-Germanic *rubbōną (“to rub, scrape”), related to Proto-Germanic *reufaną (“to tear”), *raubōną (“to rob, steal, plunder”), 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.
- 1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 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.
- (geology) A mass or stratum of fragments of rock lying under the alluvium and derived from the neighbouring rock.
- 1855, Sir Charles Lyell, A Manual of Elementary Geology:
- The overlying beds are composed of such calcareous rubble and flints, rudely stratified
- (UK, dialect, in the plural) The whole of the bran of wheat before it is sorted into pollard, bran, etc.[3]
Derived terms
[edit]Related terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]the broken remains of an object, usually rock or masonry
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References
[edit]- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition
- ^ Douglas Harper (2001–2024) “rubble”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.
- ^ 1858, Peter Lund Simmonds, The Dictionary of Trade Products
Anagrams
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