Other forms: erosions
Erosion is the slow wearing away of land by water, wind and ice. A cliff eating back into a farmer's field, a riverbank sliding into the water, a gully cut down a hillside after one wet winter.
The word carries the idea of patience: a landslide happens in seconds, erosion takes centuries. It sits in fixed pairs - coastal erosion, soil erosion, river erosion - and geographers keep it apart from weathering, which breaks rock where it stands while erosion carries the pieces away. The figurative use is everywhere and takes of: the erosion of trust, the erosion of rights, the erosion of your savings by inflation. The verb is erode and the adjective eroded, and eroded land does not come back inside a human lifetime.
1nounerosionThe gradual wearing away of land or rock by water, wind or ice.~81%
“Coastal erosion has taken twenty metres of the path since the last survey.”
2nounweakeningA slow weakening or reduction of something valued.~19%
“He wrote about the erosion of trust between the police and the neighbourhood.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 21 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
erosion is a natural process.
Erosion came through Middle French from Latin erosio, an eating away, built on erodo. Its first appearance in English, in 1541, was medical: a translation of a surgical text used it for ulcers eating into the inside of a mouth. Only in the eighteenth century did writers turn the word on hillsides and coastlines, where it has stayed since.
Latin
ērōsiō — eating away
Middle French
erosion
English, today
erosion
From Middle French erosion, from Latin ērōsiō (“eating away”), derived from ērōdō. The first known occurrence in English was in the 1541 translation by Robert Copland of Guy de Chauliac's medical text The Questyonary of Cyrurygens. Copland used erosion to describe how ulcers developed in the mouth. By 1774 erosion was used outside medical subjects. Oliver Goldsmith employed the term in the more contemporary geological context, in his book Natural History, with the quote
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA