pulverate
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Forms: form: pulverates
form: pulverating
form: pulverated
form: pulverated
Etymology: From Latin pulveratus, past participle of pulverare (“to pulverize”). See pulverize.
Senses: examples: text: Pulverate and mix them with Turpentine; then put them in a glass Alembick, and adde to them Camphyr, and Amber-grise, of each 3 ij.
ref: 1657, Jean de Renou, A Medicinal Dispensatory, page 687:
text: Take of camphora 12 grains, pulverate it with a few drops of spir. vin. rect., add to it sulph. chin. 1 scruple, pulvis doveri 1/2 dram, mix and divide it into 9 doses, write on it: every 2 hours 1 dose.
ref: 1876, Compilation of the divers regulations bearing upon the importation of free labourers into the colony of Surinam, volume 2, page 45:
text: It has rendered a service to viatecture which is far better than to pulverate and lift the road into clouds of dust, white-washing our countryside, and making its appearance hideous.
ref: 1912 March 9, W. T. Lalonde, “Traction Engines on Roads”, in The Autocar, volume 28, number 855, page 456:
text: "I've been thinking,” Alix said slowly, “that we fight man's wars and pulverate his garbage and dehydrate his sewerage, but we're not citizens. Why, Manny?"
ref: 2024, William C. Gault, Title Fight, page 4:
glosses: To beat or reduce to powder or dust; to pulverise.
examples: text: Have not we all seen the changed texture and productive quality of a weathered subsoil; seen the sterile clay from the deep drain moulder into manageable and wholesome soil under the culture of a single wintering: reminding us of the saying of Dr. Clarke, that "the frost is God's plough, which he drives through every inch of ground," pulverating and fructifying all ?
ref: 1856, “Deep Cultivation— At home and Abroad”, in British Farmer's Magazine, volume 77, page 536:
text: […]shows a field of standing corn stalks being "pulverated" into a finished seedbed in one operation.
ref: 1928, Farm Machinery and Hardware, page 27:
text: Pulverating tough sod — making a finished seedbed, ready for planting, in one operation.
ref: 1929, Farm Equipment Red Book - Volumes 14-15, page 167:
text: Plowing cost less than pulverating.
ref: 1932, S. H. McCrory, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Engineering, page 13:
text: Judging from appearances, the plot which had been pulverated (plowed with a pulverator plow on March 17) and drilled immediately and the plot which had been pulverated and disked once were best.
ref: 2021, William Shurtleff, Akiko Aoyagi, History of Soybeans and the Great Agricultural Revolution (1874-2021), page 315:
topics: agriculture
business
lifestyle
glosses: To break up soil or organic matter into a fine, powdery texture, often by means of a special plow.
examples: text: This subordination of the life to the ideal constitutes the vigorous foundation of his mannish personality. Mousinho's pulverating vocation can be summed up in the following word of immense meaning : «Serving».
ref: 1936, Boletim geral das colónias - Issues 127-132, page 257:
text: Old sleeping bag, cold floor, pulverated heart.
ref: 2009, David Nadelberg, “Summer Poison”, in Mortified: Love Is a Battlefield, page 121:
glosses: To crush or subdue; to overwhelm.
examples: text: If the cock be observed to scrape straw together, and rub himself in it, it is no more than what cocks and hens continually do, in heaps of dust, &c., when they have no thought of incubation, but merely from their pulverating instinct.
ref: 1829, Georges Cuvier, The animal kingdom - Volume 8, page 191:
text: It is thus we can account for the fact, that whilst these are the most pulverating of birds, continually filling their feathers with dry earth, in order to destroy the vermin which annoy them, those quadrupends similarly roll themselves in the dust, for the sake of ridding themselves of similar enemies picked up in the same situations.
ref: 1833, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Animals in the Collection of the Zoological Society of Doublin, page 118:
text: All larks are pulverating birds; but this one is so particularly attached to powdering itself with dust, that, on being supplied with some in a state of captivity, it will immediately testify its joy by a little soft cry, frequently repeated, and by precipitate movements of the wings, and bristling of all the feathers.
ref: 1836, Oliver Goldsmith, History of the earth and animated nature, page 256:
glosses: To take a dust bath.
raw_tags: of birds
examples: text: Considerably quantities of pulverating feldspar are found on the rising ground, washed by the rains, near the Guapo mouth and on its left banks.
ref: 1836, Robert Montgomery Martin, History of the West Indies, page 185:
text: Coppery grey above, uniform or with three or five longitudinal series of blackish dots or elongate quadrangular spots; lower surfaces more or less marbled or pulverated with grey.
ref: 1885, George Albert Boulenger, Catalogue of the Lizards in the British Museum, page 241:
text: bluish argillaceious shale with irregularly sandy, friable, or semi-pulverated strata.
ref: 1940, Walter Bryan Jones, Bauxite Deposits of Alabama, page 82:
glosses: To be powdery or granular.