Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A loose mass of angular fragments of rock or masonry crumbled by natural or human forces.
  • noun Irregular fragments or pieces of rock used in masonry.
  • noun The masonry made with such rocks.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Rough stones of irregular shapes and sizes, broken from larger masses either naturally or artificially, as by geological action, in quarrying, or in stone-cutting or blasting.
  • noun Masonry of rubble; rubble-work.
  • noun By extension, any solid substance in irregularly broken pieces.
  • noun The whole of the bran of wheat before it is sorted into pollard, bran, etc. [Prov. Eng.]

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Water-worn or rough broken stones; broken bricks, etc., used in coarse masonry, or to fill up between the facing courses of walls.
  • noun Rough stone as it comes from the quarry; also, a quarryman's term for the upper fragmentary and decomposed portion of a mass of stone; brash.
  • noun (Geol.) A mass or stratum of fragments or rock lying under the alluvium, and derived from the neighboring rock.
  • noun Prov. Eng. The whole of the bran of wheat before it is sorted into pollard, bran, etc.
  • noun rubble masonry in which courses are formed by leveling off the work at certain heights.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The broken remains of an object, usually rock or masonry.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the remains of something that has been destroyed or broken up

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English rubel.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Anglo-Norman *robel ("bits of broken stone"). Presumably related to rubbish, originally of same meaning (bits of stone). Ultimately presumably from Proto-Germanic *raub- (“to break”), perhaps via Old French robe (English rob ("steal")) in sense of “plunder, destroy”; see also Middle English, Middle French -el.

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Examples

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  • In castle architecture, walling made of rough, undressed stones or fill stone. In Bedrock, the short husband of Betty and neighbor of Fred.

    August 26, 2008