Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The act of comminuting or reducing to fine particles or to a powder; pulverization.
- noun In surgery, a comminute fracture.
- noun Attenuation or diminution by small abstractions.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The act of reducing to a fine powder or to small particles; pulverization; the state of being comminuted.
- noun (Surg.) Fracture (of a bone) into a number of pieces.
- noun Gradual diminution by the removal of small particles at a time; a lessening; a wearing away.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun mining The
breaking orgrinding up of a material to form smallerparticles . - noun traumatology Fracture of a bone site in multiple
pieces (at least three);crumbling .
Etymologies
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Examples
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Unit 3 (150–230 cm) consists of a structureless black mud with elevated shear strength, which represents a comminution till deposited under grounded ice (Domack et al., 2001a).
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The progression from the comminution till and gravelly mud of Units 3 and 2 into the diatomaceous mud of Unit 1 likely represents the Last Glacial Maximum to Holocene transition in the northwestern Weddell Sea.
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For though it be true that the most solid bodies have pores, still air or spirit do not easily submit to such extremely fine comminution, just as water refuses to run out at very small chinks.
The New Organon 2005
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The distinction is this: breaking is a division and separation into large parts, comminution into parts of any size, but there must be more of them than two.
Meteorology 2002
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In crabs, then, and in such other animals as are able to seize their food in a leisurely manner, inasmuch as their mouth is not called on to perform its office while they are still in the water, the two functions are assigned to different parts, prehension to the hands or feet, biting and comminution of food to the mouth.
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For their claws are substitutes for hands, and so require to be suitable for the prehension of food, and not for its comminution; for such comminution and biting is the office of teeth.
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This type of middling product occurs even in the most precise separation processes, and valuable mineral so contained cannot be separated by further processing without additional comminution.
Chapter 20 1993
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The tenacity describes the fracturing behavior (as opposed to cleavage or scratch (abrasive) hardness) of the mineral, and decisively governs the behavior of a mineral during comminution.
Chapter 20 1993
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This is done through the separation of the simultaneous processes of amalgamation and grinding or comminution in pan grinders (as in Chile) or stamping mills (as in Ecuador and Colombia) using two procedural steps.
Chapter 20 1993
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- For all of the marketable hand-sorted pre-concentrates, further beneficiation efforts (comminution, classifying, sorting) are not necessary.
Chapter 20 1993
knitandpurl commented on the word comminution
"I hadn't fought ten seconds before I felt this softness in him, realized all that quality of modern upper-class England that never goes to the quick, that hedges about rules and those petty points of honour that are the ultimate comminution of honour, that claims credit for things demonstrably half done."
Tono-Bungay by H.G. Wells, p 31 of the Everyman paperback
March 12, 2015