jetsam

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“
The ancestors of our Easter Bunny and a host of other traditional symbols are now just so much flotsam and jetsam, awash in a sea of imagistic excess.

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Definitions (7)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (3)

  1. noun Cargo or equipment thrown overboard to lighten a ship in distress.
  2. noun Discarded cargo or equipment found washed ashore. See Usage Note at flotsam.
  3. noun Discarded odds and ends.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (2)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913

Toggle WordNet definitions WordNet (2)

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Examples (50)

  • Rose saw a pile of driftwood, flotsam, jetsam, and seeweed. —  Question Quest
  • This man had chosen the wilderness, and now the wilderness had taken him and tossed him up like the jetsam of a flood. —  SICK HEART RIVER
  • The garage was brimming with all manner of worn-out flotsam and jetsam, some of which had been regurgitated onto rickety sawhorse tables in the driveway. —  EQMM,May2007
  • ‘I shall knit,’ Mrs. Bradley replied, producing, as soon as breakfast was cleared away, the shapeless and repulsive length of jetsam which it was her custom to dignify by the name of knitting. —  The Dancing Druids - Gladys Mitchell - Bradley 21: 1948
  • He'd rather go into some office—any office—every day than to turn into fifty-year-old retired jetsam washed up on some beach somewhere. —  The BROTHERHOOD of the HOLY SHRO
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This word has been looked up 95 times.

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Etymologies (2)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. From earlier jetson, alteration of Middle English jetteson, a throwing overboard; see jettison.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. Also jetsom, jetsome; a corruption of the earlier jetson, jettison, as flotsam is of the earlier flotson, *flottison: see jettison.
 

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/ˈdʒɛtsəm/
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