scree – English noun declension

English noun forms of scree

Noun: scree
Singularscree
Pluralscrees

Sample Sentences

  • To the north the towering scree-strewn slopes of Saddleback begin to draw nearer as we start the abrupt descent towards Keswick. [1961 October, ""Voyageur"", “The Cockermouth, Keswick & Penrith Railway”, in Trains Illustrated, page 601:]
  • Struggling down the slope,
  • There's not much hope.
  • I begin to try to ride the scree
  • But the rocks are tumbling all around me. [1973, Peter Gabriel with Genesis, Riding the Scree:]
  • Sprawled prone among the rocks, the team waited for a reply to their request to fire. […] Occasional rounds zinged off the scree, each with a different pitch. [2003, Bing (Francis J.) West, chapter XXV, in The Pepperdogs: A Novel, New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 328:]
  • Acres of the industrial port had been reduced to desolation, half-walls, half-chimneys, crazy sticks of steel that looped up out of concrete scree. The temptation not to clear and rebuild must have been strong. [2002, Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-century Russia, New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, →OCLC, page 243:]
  • The next landmark was an apachita 'cairn', at the top of a steep scree. Each pilgrim carried a stone to the summit, spat on it, and threw it on to the cairn — the purpose being, I was told, to relieve the soul of its sins […] [1987, Michael J. Sallnow, Pilgrims of the Andes: Regional Cults in Cusco (Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry), Washington, D.C.; London: Smithsonian Institution Press, →ISBN, page 189:]
  • Also, special to Crete, and probably derived from some aspect of its climactic history, is cementation. Many screes are converted, in whole or in part, into concrete-like breccias. Carapaces of cemented scree encrust steep slopes. Cliffs of conglomerate or marl are covered with a layer of re-deposited limestone and look like hard rock. However, the loose contents are apt to trickle out through a breach in the crust, resulting in the jagged and hollow cliffs which are a picturesque feature of Crete [2008, I[oannis] N[ikolaou] Vogiatzakis, O. Rackham, “Crete”, in I. N. Vogiatzakis, G[loria] Pungetti, A[ntoinette] M. Mannion, editors, Mediterranean Island Landscapes: Natural and Cultural Approaches (Landscape Series; 9), Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, →ISBN, section II (Mediterranean Island Landscapes), page 252:]

Etymology

Probably a back-formation from screes, from Old Norse skriða (“landslide, landslip”); compare skríða (“to glide”) (from Proto-Germanic *skrīþaną (“to crawl; to glide; to walk”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kreyt-, *(s)ker- (“to bend, turn”)). The word is cognate with Icelandic skriða (“avalanche; landslide, landslip; steep mountain- or hillside made up of gravel and loose rocks”). See: Old Norse Nouns 'skriða', Icelandic Nouns 'skriða'.