Word of the Day:
excavation
What It Means
The act of excavating, or of making hollow, by cutting, scooping, or digging out a part of a solid mass.
Especially, the trade of digging engineered holes for building foundations, roadbed preparations, and similar purposes.
Near-synonyms: hollowing out, hollowing
Excavation in Context
“Chua looks at the landscape of childhood rather like a mining engineer looks at a pristine landscape—ripe for the excavation of talent.”
Did You Know?
From Latin excavātiō (“a hollowing out”), from excavō (“to hollow out”), from ex + cavō (“to hollow out”), from cavus (“hollow”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱewh₁- (“vault, hole”). Equivalent to excavate + -ion.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: excavation (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “excavation.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/excavation. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
