scavenge

UK/ˈskæv.ɪndʒ/

verbB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,927 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: scavenging, scavenged, scavenges

To scavenge is to search through waste for anything useful. Scavenge for food, scavenge parts, scavenging gulls.

In nature it is a respectable living: scavengers clear the dead and prevent disease, and vultures do more for public health than most people realise. Applied to people it usually implies desperation, which is the same act judged differently.

Definitions of scavenge

1verbscavengeTo search through waste for anything useful.B2+
“He scavenged old bikes from the dump and fixed them up to sell.”

scavenge is a searching.

Where it comes from

A back-formation from scavenger, which came from an old word for a street cleaner.

a back-formation from scavenger. Compare messenger and passenger.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

scavenge in the wild

For picking materials from the curbside trash collection, expressions such as curb shopping, trash picking or street scavenging are sometimes used.
Dumpster diving
Jackals may occasionally assemble in small packs, for example, to scavenge a carcass, but they normally hunt either alone or in pairs.
Jackal
While in larval form, they scavenge by consuming dead insects on the ground.
Panorpidae
Most modern four-stroke engines use crossflow cylinder heads and valve timing overlap to scavenge the cylinders.
Scavenging (engine)
Modern two-stroke engines use either Schnuerle scavenging (also known as "loop scavenging") or uniflow scavenging.
Scavenging (engine)

1 / 2

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.

Related words

scavenger

← Vocabulary