technofossil means A fossil formed from an industrial man-made object or material. It carries an Arena rating of 1316, earned across 11 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, technofossil ranks #1,698 of 17,149 for Most Exacting Words, #1,700 of 17,124 for Most Sublime Words, #2,089 of 17,163 for Funniest Words, #2,318 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words.
Why “technofossil” is a great word
A durable remnant of human industry, preserved and incorporated into the geological record. The term is a modern union of the combining form *techno-* (meaning "art, skill, craft," later "technical, technological") with *fossil* (from Latin *fossilis*, "dug up"), coined by Professor Jan Zalasiewicz and his colleagues at the University of Leicester. Unlike "artifact"—a term for any object of human making, often curated on a museum shelf—or "ichnofossil"—a fossilized trace of organic behavior like a burrow—the technofossil is the manufactured object itself, subsumed by strata. It is the tire iron encased in riverbed silt, the bottle cap compressed into a layer of landfill, the microplastic fragment settling into the seabed's ooze—a quiet stratum of our own making, waiting to be read by deep time.
Etymology
From techno- + fossil.
noun
- A fossil formed from an industrial man-made object or material.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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