Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use detritus in a sentence

16 example sentences · noun

Detritus means pieces of rock broken off by ice, glacier, or erosion. Example: “The ovoplasma was clear and free of detritus.”

Examples of detritus by meaning

nounOrganic waste material from decomposing dead plants or animals.

  • Woody detritus is an important component of forested ecosystems.2009, Christian Wirth, Gerd Gleixner, Martin Heimann, Old-Growth Forests: Function, Fate and Value, Springer Science & Business Media...

nounAny debris or fragments of disintegrated material.

  • No newspapers, no renegade scraps of domestic detritus, no rubber bands, paper clips, coupons, pens or pencils, notebooks, magazines.2001, Chip Kidd, The Cheese Monkeys
  • The trains also clear up their own detritus as they travel.2022 September 7, Tom Allett, “At the cutting edge of NR's track work”, in RAIL, number 965, page 39

More sentences with detritus

  • The ovoplasma was clear and free of detritus.From the entry ovoplasma
  • Others are detritivores (i.e. they feed off organic detritus), such as some pteropods.2014, Louis Legendre, “Pelagic Marine Ecosystems and Biogeochemical Cycles”, in André Monaco, Patrick Prouzet, editors, Ecosystem…. From the entry detritivore
  • They turned out to be the same sort of detritus as everything else.2007, Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, The Pain of Unbelonging. From the entry mathom
  • Resedimented tufas also contribute where erosion has washed detritus from other hillside tufa deposits.2003, Martyn Pedley, Ian Hill, “The recognition of barrage and paludal tufa systems by GPR: case studies of the geometry and correlation…. From the entry tufa
  • Spaghetti-like tentacles extend over the substrate to gather detritus and associated microfauna.2001, Julian Sprung, Invertebrates: A Quick Reference Guide, page 142. From the entry spaghettilike
  • Twenty-first century nation states will no longer tolerate even the mild humiliation of hosting the detritus of 18th- and 19th-century empires.2013 August 14, Simon Jenkins, “Gibraltar and the Falklands deny the logic of history”, in The Guardian. From the entry realpolitik
  • And the city as Junkspace vomits its detritus in the form of those unable or unwilling to pay the price for its maintenance.2011, Ted Gournelos, David J. Gunkel, Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age, →ISBN. From the entry junkspace
  • Hawaiian sand is utterly different: it is comminuted coral and algae, the broken detritus of a hundred thousand storms washed up against the land.2004, Richard Fortey, The Earth, Folio Society, published 2011, page 53. From the entry comminuted
  • There would also have been a strand-line of washed-up plants and animals, edible detritus that was tantalisingly out of reach of the water-bound animals of the day.2015, Dave Goulson, A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm, Picador, →ISBN, pages 24-25. From the entry waterproof
  • It seemed as if the sand had not had time to overdrift the detritus of one campaign before a new deposit of ruin had been left behind.2015, Frederick Grice, Gillian Clarke, War's Nomads. From the entry overdrift
  • In the aphotic, profundal zone food resources are provided exclusively through secondary productivity, consumption of settling detritus (or the organisms that feed on such detritus), and microbial food resources.2003, Andrew S. Cohen, “The Biological Environment of Lakes”, in Paleolimnology: The History and Evolution of Lake Systems, Oxford…. From the entry aphotic
  • The fantastic flame scallops, Lima spp. are filter feeding clams that subsist, as most clams do, by feeding on bacteria, phytoplankton, dissolved organic material, and detritus in the water.2001, Julian Sprung, Invertebrates: A Quick Reference Guide, page 87. From the entry flame scallop
  • Portia first made a splash in the art world with her monochromatic accumulations of plastic detritus arranged in “trashscapes” that reflected our cultural assumptions back at us through their vastness.2011, Stephen Hren, Tales From the Sustainable Underground. From the entry trashscape

Meaning of detritus

  1. noun Pieces of rock broken off by ice, glacier, or erosion.
  2. noun Organic waste material from decomposing dead plants or animals.
  3. noun Any debris or fragments of disintegrated material.

Full definition of detritus

Questions about detritus in a sentence

How do you use detritus in a sentence?
Detritus is used as a noun. For example: “The ovoplasma was clear and free of detritus.”
What is a short sentence with detritus?
“The ovoplasma was clear and free of detritus.”
What does detritus mean?
Detritus means pieces of rock broken off by ice, glacier, or erosion.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: detritus (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use detritus in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/detritus. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.