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brownfield

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechToo rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

Other forms: brownfields

Brownfield is land once built on and now ready to be built on again. A brownfield site.

Building on it is preferred to open land and costs more, since old ground has to be cleaned. A brownfield site can hide contamination that nobody recorded when the works closed.

Dumelow · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of brownfield

  1. 1nounbrownfieldLand once built on and now ready to be built on again.C2

    “The brownfield site had been a gasworks and cost a fortune to clear.”

brownfield is land.

Where it comes from

Brown plus field, set against greenfield, land never built on.

From brown + field.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in In the City

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brownfield in the wild

  • The main difference in definitions of whether a piece of land is considered a brownfield or not depends on the presence or absence of pollution.

    Brownfield land

  • Overall, brownfield land is a site previously developed for industrial or commercial purposes and thus requires further development before reuse.

    Brownfield land

  • Such environmentally distressed properties, with site clean-up and mitigation considerations, are commonly referred to as brownfields.

    Land recycling

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.