debris – English noun declension

English noun forms of debris

Noun: debris
Singulardebris

Sample 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. [2012 December 21, David M. Halbfinger, Charles V. Bagli, Sarah Maslin Nir, “On Ravaged Coastline, It’s Rebuild Deliberately vs. Rebuild Now”, in The New York Times:]
  • 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. [2022 January 12, Benedict le Vay, “The heroes of Soham...”, in RAIL, number 948, archived from the original on 21 Dec 2020, page 43:]
  • Melissa Foley clears debris in her neighborhood as the San Lorenzo River rises in Felton on Saturday, January 14. [2023 January 16, “California’s flooding, in pictures”, in CNN, archived from the original on 17 Mar 2023:]
  • [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, […]. [2013 July 20, “Welcome to the plastisphere”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8845, archived from the original on 08 Mar 2023:]

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. See: French Nouns 'débris', Old English Nouns 'berstan'.