Other forms: concretes
Concrete is the grey stuff cities are made of: cement, sand, gravel and water, poured wet in the afternoon and gone hard by morning. A pavement, a motorway bridge, the block of flats across the road, the floor of a garage.
The other concrete is an adjective, and it is the one exam questions want: real and definite, something you can point at. Concrete evidence, concrete proposals, a concrete example, with abstract as its opposite, and the two are worth learning as a pair, since an abstract noun like freedom has no concrete form. The noun is uncountable, so you pour concrete and never a concrete. There is a verb as well, and to concrete a yard is to cover it in the stuff. A concrete jungle is a city with nothing green left in it.
1nounconcreteA hard building material made from cement, sand, stones and water.~42%
“They poured the concrete for the foundations on Monday.”
2adjectivespecificReal, definite and specific rather than general or imagined.~8%
“Give me a concrete example instead of a theory.”
3adjectiveadjectiveMade of concrete.~50%
“The garden was hidden behind a concrete wall.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
concrete is a building material.
Concrete is Latin concrētus, the past participle of concrescō, to curdle or grow together, from con-, together, and crescō, to grow. Something concrete had grown into a single solid mass, which describes the wet mix in the mixer exactly, and also describes an idea that has hardened into something you can hold.
Latin
concrētus
English, today
concrete
Latin concrētus, past participle of concrescō (to curdle) from con- (with, together) + crescō (to grow, rise).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA