Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

droppings

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,151 of 15,258neutral

Droppings are the waste an animal leaves, used to identify it. Rabbit droppings, mouse droppings, fresh droppings.

Trackers read them for species, diet and how recently the animal passed, and the shape and size are as identifying as a footprint. The word is always plural and it is the polite one — scat is the technical term and there are blunter words. Note drop, from which it is formed.

Definitions of droppings

  1. 1noundroppingsThe waste an animal leaves.B2+

    “We found mouse droppings in the kitchen cupboard.”

droppings is animal waste.

Where it comes from

dropping by surface analysis, drop + -ing.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Camping & Outdoors

Practise this word

droppings in the wild

  • In 2005, H7N3 was detected in migratory bird droppings in Taiwan.

    Influenza A virus subtype H7N3

  • In 1961, filmmaker Gene Bernofsky and artist Clark Richert, art students from the University of Kansas, developed an art concept they called Drop Art or droppings.

    Drop Art

  • Birds' droppings consist of both feces and urine, which are excreted together through the cloaca.

    Urohidrosis

  • The droppings have been used in facials throughout Japanese history.

    Uguisu no fun

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.