scree

UK/skɹiː/US/skɹi/

nounC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,850 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: screes

Scree is loose broken stone on a steep slope. A scree slope, cross the scree, scree running.

It is made by frost breaking rock apart above, and it moves under you, which is exhausting to climb and fast to descend. Scree running is the deliberate art of coming down it in long sliding strides.

Definitions of scree

1nounscreeLoose broken stone on a steep slope.C1
“We slipped and slid down the scree, sending loose stones clattering below.”

scree is a stone.

Where it comes from

Probably from Old Norse skritha, a landslide, from a verb meaning to glide.

Old Norse
skriða — landslide, landslip
English, today
scree

Probably a a back-formation from screes, from Old Norse skriða (“landslide, landslip”); compare skríða (“to glide”) (from Proto-Germanic skrīþaną (“to crawl; to glide; to walk”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)kreyt-, (s)ker- (“to bend, turn”)). The word is cognate with Icelandic skriða (“avalanche; landslide, landslip; steep mountain- or hillside made up of gravel and loose rocks”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Camping & Outdoors

Practise this word

scree in the wild

Typical finds include reject axes, rough-outs and blades created by knapping large lumps of the rock found in the scree or perhaps by simple quarrying or opencast mining.
Langdale axe industry
The exact definition of scree in the primary literature is somewhat relaxed, and it often overlaps with both talus and colluvium.
Scree
One way to tell them apart is that a person can boot-ski scree and boulder hop talus.
Scree
There are ledges around most of the inner wall that may have once been terraces or slumped piles of scree.
Abul Wáfa (crater)
The western half of the interior floor is covered with a slope of scree, leaving a small level floor on the eastern side.
Bergman (crater)

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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.

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