bedrock

UK/ˈbɛd.ɹɒk/US/ˈbɛdˌɹɑk/

nounB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #11,795 of 15,258leans written

Bedrock is the solid rock underneath the loose soil. Reach bedrock, anchored into bedrock, the bedrock of the argument.

How deep it lies decides what can be built above it, and a tall building is usually tied down into it. The figurative sense is at least as common: the bedrock of a case is the part that would survive everything else being taken away.

Definitions of bedrock

1nounbedrockThe solid rock underneath the loose soil.B2+
“The builders had to dig through three metres of clay to reach bedrock.”

bedrock is rock.

Where it comes from

Bed plus rock. Bed here is the geological sense of a layer, which is very old in English.

From bed + rock.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Rocks & Minerals

Practise this word

bedrock in the wild

The top of the bedrock is known as rockhead.
Bedrock
As a glacier moves down a valley, friction causes the basal ice of the glacier to melt and infiltrate joints (cracks) in the bedrock.
Plucking (glaciation)
Since the cheaper Baileys were kept in production along with the Bedrocks, to make the distinction easier, square designs were modelled in the body of the bedrock planes.
Bedrock plane
A bedrock river is a river that has little to no alluvium mantling the bedrock over which it flows.
Bedrock river
However, most bedrock rivers are not pure forms; they are a combination of a bedrock channel and an alluvial channel.
Bedrock river

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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