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The Collaborative International Dictionary
Breccia

Breccia \Brec"cia\, n. [It., breach, pebble, fragments of stone, fr. F. br[`e]che; of German origin. See Breach.] (Geol.) A rock composed of angular fragments either of the same mineral or of different minerals, etc., united by a cement, and commonly presenting a variety of colors.

Bone breccia, a breccia containing bones, usually fragmentary.

Coin breccia, a breccia containing coins.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
breccia

"rock of angular pieces," 1774, from Italian breccia, "marble of angular pieces," from a Germanic source akin to Old High German brecha "a breaking," from Proto-Germanic *brekan, from PIE *bhreg- "to break" (see fraction).

Wiktionary
breccia

n. (label en petrology) A rock composed of angular fragments in a matrix that may be of a similar or a different material.

WordNet
breccia

n. a rudaceous rock consisting of sharp fragments embedded in clay or sand

Wikipedia
Breccia

Breccia ( or ) is a rock composed of broken fragments of minerals or rock cemented together by a fine-grained matrix that can be similar to or different from the composition of the fragments.

The word has its origins in the Italian language, in which it means either "loose gravel" or "stone made by cemented gravel". A breccia may have a variety of different origins, as indicated by the named types including sedimentary breccia, tectonic breccia, igneous breccia, impact breccia, and hydrothermal breccia.

Usage examples of "breccia".

Noetic shreds, arkose shards, biotite fragments tumbling and grinding in a dry breccia slurry.

Scores of beautiful vases of alabaster, breccia, marble, and soapstone, wrought in some cases to the thinness of a modern china cup, suggest at once the protodynastic Egyptian bowls of diorite and syenite, and show that if the Cretan took the idea from Egyptian models, he was not behind his master in the skill with which he carried it out.

It was a breccia, regolith compacted so the grains stuck together, analogous to sandstone on Earth.

He straightened up, hands and sleeves soiled, holding a pebble, an irregular chunk of breccia the size and shape of a walnut.

Large flagstones of fine limestone and red breccia formed the pavement now, and every slab bore an inscription.

Is it all this broken-up breccia or is there, maybe, a big old finger of basalt sticking up that we could scramble right on down?

Argon-39 and argon-40 dating had shown the chunk of troctolite breccia to be 3.

From what he could tell from a distance, it appeared to be a breccia fragment.

They climbed slopes of scree and breccia to see the scrubland all the miles to the forest, and something burning before them.

But you understand that, in reality, historically, the Apollo 13 command module successfully landed at Fra Mauro and picked up fragments of breccias several kilometers from the landing site.

Of particular interest are the breccias, which are broken fragments of meteorites that smashed into the Moon and broke up only to be compressed and cemented together with pre-existing Moon material, forming new rocks, the breccias, millions of years later.

It is made of a remarkable variety of porphyritic diorite that resembles breccia.

Scores of beautiful vases of alabaster, breccia, marble, and soapstone, wrought in some cases to the thinness of a modern china cup, suggest at once the protodynastic Egyptian bowls of diorite and syenite, and show that if the Cretan took the idea from Egyptian models, he was not behind his master in the skill with which he carried it out.

But in bedrock like this we can expect to find fragments in the breccias, recycled repeatedly from earlier ejecta blankets.

And he thought he could see that this breccia was in fact itself made up of earlier breccias, breccias nested in breccias like biblical generations, remnants of still earlier impacts.