Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Waste matter, such as sweat, urine, or feces, discharged from the body.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Any matter eliminated as useless from the living body; specifically, such substances as have really entered into the tissues of the body and are the product of its metabolism, as urine or sweat. In this restricted sense the word would not include the feces.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. Matters to be excreted.
WordNet 3.0
- n. waste matter (as urine or sweat but especially feces) discharged from the body
Etymologies
- Latin excrēta, from neuter pl. past participle of excernere, to excrete; see excrete. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Of the two and a half million people who live there every drop of liquid or other human excreta is taken out in buckets and baskets slung on bamboo poles and borne on the shoulders of the patient, willing, human carrier, all destined for the land as a precious and priceless offering.”
“Every drop of that human excreta is a valuable asset and provides the means of fertilizing their farms and gardens, and is treasured up and used with a care unthought of in our own country, and is dealt out to the soil which is thereby fertilized to an extent that no soil in any other country is fertilized.”
“Probably the best known contrivance for deodorizing the excreta is the dry earth system as applied in the earth closet, in which advantage is taken of the deodorizing properties of earth.”
“Study required her and her assistant to collect, weigh and analyze the "excreta" from selected ducks every hour on the hour for 48 hours straight.”
“You collect the scat, wash away all the biodegradable "excreta", and analyze the bones and hairs that are left.”
“The principle of all types of pit latrine is that wastes such as excreta, anal cleaning materials, sullage and refuse are deposited in a hole in the ground.”
“Excuuuuse me, friends, but using "excreta" is not the homeopathic principle of similars!”
“Today, however, when I noticed all the fat, black excreta hither and yon upon our hardwood floors, I came to my senses... at just about the same moment that the squirrel twigged to my presence and began to go all St. Vitus on our collectibles.”
“A Dalit woman was allegedly assaulted and forced to eat human excreta after being branded a witch at a village in Bihar Purnia district.”
“All these can be dealt with through safe disposal of excreta and safe hygienic behaviour.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘excreta’.
-
...:::bella:::...
originally started as an attempt to collect words I found visually and auditorially beautiful, as well as psychically evocative, this has become nothing more than a grab bag of word curiosities, a ...
bergamot, jambalaya, bee's knees, heliotrope, hosanna, gamboge, aureole, filial, madrigal, multilingual, sacrosanct, sojourn and 1072 more...
-
Words I See Primarily in Books About ...
furze, peat, turnips, Michaelmas, Candlemas, hunter's moon, harvest moon, banish, rampart, lest, ordure, market day and 74 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for excreta.
bilby "Stephen and Jessica Whyte, their three young children and another family were at the hotel to watch the NRL grand final on October 5. After a series of complaints, they were given a free bowl of gelato.
Mrs Whyte says she became violently ill on putting a spoonful to her lips. The family sent a sample to the National Measurements Institute, which found that it had 'properties similar to human excreta'.
'The real issue is that we were fed, as a family, shit, at someone's pub,' Mr Whyte told 2UE yesterday."
- Dylan Welch, ''Faeces in gelato': chef offers to take DNA test', smh.com.au, 28 Oct 2008. Oct 28, 2008