The Collaborative International Dictionary
Litter \Lit"ter\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Littered (l[i^]t"t[~e]rd); p. pr. & vb. n. Littering.]
-
To supply with litter, as cattle; to cover with litter, as the floor of a stall.
Tell them how they litter their jades.
--Bp. Hackett.For his ease, well littered was the floor.
--Dryden. -
To put into a confused or disordered condition; to strew with scattered articles; as, to litter a room.
The room with volumes littered round.
--Swift. -
To give birth to; to bear; -- said of brutes, esp. those which produce more than one at a birth, and also of human beings, in abhorrence or contempt.
We might conceive that dogs were created blind, because we observe they were littered so with us.
--Sir T. Browne.The son that she did litter here, A freckled whelp hagborn.
--Shak.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1540s, of animals, "process of bringing forth young in a single birth," verbal noun from present participle of litter (v.). Meaning "act of furnishing with bedding" is from c.1600. That of "act of dropping litter" is from 1900.
Wiktionary
n. The dropping of litter. vb. (present participle of litter English)
Usage examples of "littering".
Leaving his breakfast untasted, he wandered aimlessly about the room, littering the hearth with matches as he constantly relighted his pipe, which went out every few minutes.
Which, Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus thought, watching Caesar as he read on through the papers littering his desk here in Rhodes, is why Asia Province tends to regard him as a god.
Night after night he bolted upright in the dark, panting and reaching for his axe before he realized the wagons were not in flames, that no bloody-muzzled shapes snarled over torn and twisted bodies littering the ground.
Baci waved a trembling hand at the sleeping bodies littering the drawing room.
The bodies he saw littering the moon-splashed grass were of men, not beasts: hawk-faced, dark-skinned men, naked, transfixed by arrows or mangled by sword-strokes.
A planetary government, I might add, which has already requested your immediate court martial for mutiny, treason, insubordination, misappropriation of private property, and everything else snort of littering?
Gorlat approached from up the corridor, various scatered bodies, the stunned carcasses of Starfleet security, littering his path.
Across the empty hills which bordered the Western Road, itself a brown swampish gash across the earth with old corpses littering its length.
Justice Deauville sat alone in one dark corner, the remains of his supper littering the table.
The Elysian transporter effect pulsed around Data, and in a moment he was standing, off balance, on one of the tilted rocks littering the beach below the mountain.
Leaving his breakfast untasted, he wandered aimlessly about the room, littering the hearth with matches as he constantly relighted his pipe, which went out every few minutes.
Foto and used car pennants to draw up unobtrusively among the shopping carts littering the R Dan Snively Memorial Parking Lot.
Porvenir, littering the Plaza, floating in the gutters, fired out as wads for trabucos loaded with handfuls of type, blown in the wind, trampled in the mud?
The minister stared around the room, stared at the corpses littering the floor, stared at the white wood table.
He settled himself on the front bumper of a conveniently parked hovercar, one of a dozen or so littering the grass in front of the house, and set about making the beer last awhile.