debris

• débris

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.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈdɛbɹi/, /ˈdeɪbɹi/
• (US, General Australian, New Zealand) IPA^(key): /dəˈbɹiː/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɛbɹi, -iː
• Hyphenation: de‧bris

debris (uncountable)

1. Rubble, wreckage, scattered remains of something destroyed.

   Synonyms: detritus; see also Thesaurus:debris

   • 2012 December 21, David M. Halbfinger, Charles V. Bagli, Sarah Maslin Nir, “On Ravaged Coastline, It’s Rebuild Deliberately vs. Rebuild Now”, in New York Times‎^[1]:

     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.

   • 2022 January 12, Benedict le Vay, “The heroes of Soham...”, in RAIL, number 948, page 43:

     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.

2. Litter and discarded refuse.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:trash

   • 2013 July 20, “Welcome to the plastisphere”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8845:

     [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, […].

3. The ruins of a broken-down structure.
4. (geology) Large rock fragments left by a melting glacier etc.

• B-sider, Brides, biders, birdes, brides, rebids, sibred