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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
excavate
verb
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
archaeologist
▪ The archaeologist will often be excavating a single site.
▪ If archaeologists subsequently excavate that shifted material, they need to be able to recognize that it is in a secondary context.
▪ There are two potential problems that archaeologists can have when excavating putative glass furnaces.
site
▪ The archaeologist will often be excavating a single site.
▪ Archaeologists excavate sites carefully and record everything they see and find.
▪ Time allowed 07:09 Read in studio Archaeologists excavating the site of a medieval leper hospital have unearthed a Roman cemetery.
▪ He started excavating the site in 1961, and the dramatic nature of his discovery soon became clear.
▪ Local people called on the government to excavate the site and to protect the remains.
▪ In some cases it may help clarify the function of different parts of an excavated site as well.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Archaeologists are excavating a Bronze Age settlement on the outskirts of the village.
▪ The mosaics excavated in 1989 have now been fully restored.
▪ The turtle excavates a hole in the sand and then lays its eggs in it.
▪ Work is under way to excavate the ancient city.
▪ Workers had already begun excavating the foundations for the house.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A very large amount of gravel would be excavated to form the channel.
▪ As on land, ocean impact explosions excavate huge craters.
▪ For a time he worked with archaeologists from the University of California excavating ruins near Kayenta, Arizona.
▪ The site, needed for a parking lot, was entombed without being excavated.
▪ The stone-lined privy pit was excavated a year ago by an archaeology field class from City College.
▪ Until recently new pits were continually being excavated while others are being filled with refuse.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Excavate

Excavate \Ex"ca*vate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Excavated; p. pr. & vb. n. Excavating.] [L. excavatus, p. p. of excavare to excavate; ex out + cavare to make hollow, cavus hollow. See Cave.]

  1. To hollow out; to form cavity or hole in; to make hollow by cutting, scooping, or digging; as, to excavate a ball; to excavate the earth.

  2. To form by hollowing; to shape, as a cavity, or anything that is hollow; as, to excavate a canoe, a cellar, a channel.

  3. (Engin.) To dig out and remove, as earth.

    The material excavated was usually sand.
    --E. L. Corthell.

    Excavating pump, a kind of dredging apparatus for excavating under water, in which silt and loose material mixed with water are drawn up by a pump.
    --Knight.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
excavate

1590s, from Latin excavatus, past participle of excavare "to hollow out," from ex- "out" (see ex-) + cavare "to hollow, hollow out," from cavus "cave" (see cave (n.)). Related: Excavated; excavating.

Wiktionary
excavate

Etymology 1 vb. 1 (context transitive English) To make a hole in (something); to hollow. 2 (context transitive English) To remove part of (something) by scooping or digging it out. 3 (context transitive English) To uncover (something) by removing its covering. Etymology 2

n. (context zoology English) Any member of a major grouping of unicellular eukaryotes, of the clade Excavat

WordNet
excavate
  1. v. lay bare through digging; "Schliemann excavated Troy" [syn: unearth]

  2. find by digging in the ground; "I dug up an old box in the garden" [syn: dig up, turn up]

  3. form by hollowing; "Carnegie had a lake excavated for Princeton University's rowing team"; "excavate a cavity"

  4. remove the inner part or the core of; "the mining company wants to excavate the hillsite" [syn: dig, hollow]

Usage examples of "excavate".

There was no direct way to associate such a massive objectsome thirty paces highwith a single rock layer, but it was made out of the same blue stuff as the original six-fingered artifact, and that had been excavated from the layer immediateh below the Bookmark layer, so it seemed likely this vast structure dated from the same period.

A bottomless caisson, serving as a sort of diving-bell, in which men can work when compressed air is introduced to keep out the water in proportion to the depth below the water-level, which is gradually carried down to an adequately firm foundation by excavating at the bottom of the caisson, and building up a quay-wall or pier out of water on the top of its roof as it descends.

When a sufficient number of posts had been placed, the blocking on which the caisson had rested was knocked or blasted out, and the rock underneath was excavated.

Owing to the soft ground underneath, it was easier to excavate a hole and wall it up than to construct the regular surface cist, and the former plan was followed.

This can be explained by the known fact that Dawson dipped the fragments in potassium dichromate to harden them after they were excavated.

Abydos and Denderah, Sir Henry finally obtained a firman to excavate in what is perhaps the most romantic of all Egyptian archaeological sitesthe Valley of the Kings at Thebes.

The earliest of these transitional cultures so far found, the site at Hyrax Hill in Kenya that was excavated in 1937 by Dr.

In parts of China, houses were built of bricks carved from ignimbrite quarries, but in northern Italy the opposite approach had been taken, with homes and shops being excavated within tuff deposits.

Over among the tendons of the rock, the peeve excavated, sending up sprays of sand.

Every few minutes Andvari and his companion swapped places, keeping a fresh man at the hardest job, while the scattered piles of excavated rock and earth rapidly grew higher.

Then they pumped out the seawater, exposed the sea floor around the beach, and excavated the five flood tunnels.

Over the years, as companies went out of business or were absorbed in mergers, many site maps and plans were misplaced or deleted from databases, and when operations moved on from one sector to another, nobody spent the money or the time needed to go back and remap the excavated areas.

The coarse-grained friable sandstone, in which the lodges have been excavated, consists chiefly of subangular and rounded grains of quartz and feldspar with a small proportion of black particles.

And still there were whole sectors of the ship that, though they had been bored and excavated like the rest, were dark, unventilated, untenanted, held in reserve for future need.

Stirling, who excavated Tres Zapotes, carried out the bulk of the archaeological work done at La Venta before progress and oil money erased it.