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fossil

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈfɒsl̩//
  • United States//ˈfɑsl̩//

The mineralized remains of an animal or plant.

noun

  1. 1

    The mineralized remains of an animal or plant.

    With the permission of the Keeper of the fossil collection, therefore, the specimen was subjected to a further careful removal of the matrix in the requisite directions.

    Within the Hepaticae two types of fossils can be distinguished: those with sufficient characters to assign them to an order and those with more obscure characters.

  2. 2

    Any preserved evidence of ancient life, including shells, imprints, burrows, coprolites, and organically-produced chemicals.

    He draws eclectically on studies of baboons, descriptive anthropological accounts of hunter-gatherer societies and, in a few cases, the fossil record.

    You know what, we’ve got a limited number of heartbeats in this world so if you’re only truly happy researching fossils and can make it work for you, you go for it.

  3. 3

    A fossil word.

  4. 4

    figurativeAnything extremely old, extinct, or outdated.

  5. 5

    figurativeAn extremely old or outdated person.

    I do not want to convey any disrespectful notion or slight when I call those good and learned men fossils, but my experience is that people are apt to fossilise even at a University if they follow the same paths too persistently.

    All at once there was a tapping at the window pane. Atherton was staring at us from without. He shouted through the glass, ‘Come out of that, you fossils! — I’ve news for you!’

    “[…] What have you done with your old fossil?” “M. Poirot has gone to Paris,” I replied coldly. “And I can tell you, M. Giraud, that he is anything but an old fossil. He has solved many cases that have completely baffled the English police.”

  6. 6

    A piece of content, which, despite its age, is being repromoted to a large volume of users by the algorithm.

Etymology

From French fossile, from Latin fossilis (“something which has been dug up”), from fodio (“to dig up”).

Forms

plural
fossils
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical 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.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).