Debris | Vocabulary | Khan Academy

Oh hello, word Smith! You've caught me at a bit of an awkward time. You see, I've just survived a storm at sea; there was a shipwreck, and I clung to a piece of debris like a barnacle. I floated ashore like a bug on a twig.

I've got to do a word, don't I? Okay, uh, right, let's uh, let's do debris. How about that? Debris! The 'S' is silent because it comes from French. Now, this largish piece of driftwood is a great example. Debris is a noun; it means trash, remnants of broken things. I think that piece of debris floating in the water used to be the ship's crow's nest.

This word comes from French "de," which means to break apart, and we can break that word apart into two pieces: "D" or "du," meaning off, away, or down, and "breeze," meaning to break. That's what happened when a huge wave struck the ship I was on; it broke apart, and pieces of debris floated away from it.

All right, let's try to come up with some other related words that use the prefix "d" or "du" and look like the French word "bre." All right, 10 seconds, here we go. I'll put on some music. Here is what I came up with:

Debunk, to knock down a bad idea from the wonderful old-fashioned American slang term "bunkum," which means nonsense. So to debunk something is to knock the nonsense out of it. To bruise something is to cause an injury that discolors the skin. To crush, to bonk; it comes from the same root as "breeze," to break. Debate—this word means to match ideas, to argue. Its literal meaning is to beat down; "débat" in French.

The original meaning is just to fight, but its meaning was softened into an argument instead of a fistfight. Now, let's use debris in a sentence or two. After the storm, Shipbreaker Bay was clogged with flum and debris from half a dozen vessels.

Flum is one of my favorite not-words; it is specifically sea debris—the stuff that washes ashore after a shipwreck or a storm. But debris doesn't have to be shipwreck stuff; it's anything left over from when something is wrecked. You can use it figuratively like so: sighing, Danela picked at the debris of what used to be a pizza before her brothers got to it. Hardly anything remains of that pizza; just the box and a couple pieces of crust. Pizza debris—some people call those pizza bones.

I have never left the crusts on pizza; I always eat them, but to each their own. Incidentally, in New Orleans, if you order a Po'Boy—a sandwich with deb—accent on the first syllable—you're getting gravy-soaked beef. They call it "de" because that gravy is made with the remains, the debris of other roast beefs. It's an incredible sandwich—a Po'Boy with "de."

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