debris

nouncommon in dialogue

United Kingdom//ˈdɛbɹi//
United Kingdom//ˈdeɪbɹi//
Australia//dəˈbɹiː//

Rubble, wreckage, scattered remains of something destroyed.

noun

1
Rubble, wreckage, scattered remains of something destroyed.
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.
2
Litter and discarded refuse.
[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
Large rock fragments left by a melting glacier etc.

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.

Deborah · A judge of Israel.Debra · A female given name from Hebrew popular in the 1950s and the…debrief · To question someone after a military mission in order to…

debris · Rubble, wreckage, scattered remains of something destroyed.

debt · An action, state of mind, or object one has an obligation to…debut · A performer's first performance to the public, in sport, the…decade · A group, set, or series of ten , particularly

The neighbouring pages — Alphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.