waterworn

comparative more waterworn · superlative most waterworn · alternative water-worn

1. Worn or smoothed by the action of water erosion.

   waterworn stones

   4 more examples

   In many parts of the island the bottoms of the valleys are covered in an extraordinary manner by myriads of great loose angular fragments of the quartz rock, forming “streams of stones.” […] The blocks are not waterworn, their angles being only a little blunted […]

   1845, Charles Darwin, chapter 9, in Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World, 2nd edition, London: John Murray, pages 196–197

   The cliffs were water-worn, as if they had been gnawed for thousands of years by hungry waves.

   1861, Oliver Wendell Holmes, chapter 13, in Elsie Venner, volume 1, Boston: Ticknor & Fields, page 236

   They ate in silence, sitting on the grass in the shade of the big tree where Billy Slim’s father had kept his hotel, where the naughty girls came to work as barmaids, where the bedrooms worked day and night and where small bags of water-worn gold once passed across the bar in payment for drinks and other recreations.

   1952, Neville Shute, chapter 8, in The Far Country, London: Heinemann

   He has seen their lights around the ship at night, the green glow of their underwater torches, and he imagines them hovering in the water-worn doorways, their mouths red with the flesh of men, their wrists braceleted in seaweed, singing, weaving moonbeams into their hair.

   2010 August 2, Téa Obreht, “Blue Water Djinn”, in The New Yorker