rubble

plural rubbles

1. countableuncountableThe broken remains of an object, usually rock or masonry.

   Floods in northern India, mostly in the small state of Uttarakhand, have wrought disaster on an enormous scale.[…]Rock-filled torrents smashed vehicles and homes, burying victims under rubble and sludge.

   2013 June 29, “High and wet”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8842, page 28

   2 more examples

   The main East Coast line from Edinburgh to Berwick was blocked at Cockburnspath and Grantshouse by flood water, which washed away part of an embankment, and by the collapse of about 300 tons of rubble on to the track.

   1956 October, “Summer Floods in Scotland”, in Railway Magazine, page 658

   The old boulevard now was a sagging ruin, waiting for the wreckers. … You'd have to loathe yourself vividly to be indifferent to such destruction or, worse, rejoice at the crushing of the locus of these middle-class settlements, glad that history had made rubble of them.

   1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 72

2. countableuncountablegeographyA mass or stratum of fragments of rock lying under the alluvium and derived from the neighbouring rock.

   The overlying beds are composed of such calcareous rubble and flints, rudely stratified

   1855, Sir Charles Lyell, A Manual of Elementary Geology

3. UKcountabledialectalin pluraluncountableThe whole of the bran of wheat before it is sorted into pollard, bran, etc.

present singular third person rubbles · participle present rubbling · participle past rubbled · past rubbled

1. transitiveTo break down into rubble.