fossil
Pluralfossils
- 1The mineralized remains of an animal or plant, preserved in rock over a long span of time.
The museum displayed a fossil of an ancient fish.
They uncovered fossils scattered across the dry riverbed.
Note
The word's history explains this sense. It comes through French fossile from Latin fossilis, "something dug up", from fodio, "I dig up", so the name records how such things are found rather than what they are. Fossil also works before another noun to mean "of fossils", as in T. H. Huxley's "the Keeper of the fossil collection" (1870).
- 2Any preserved evidence of ancient life, including shells, imprints, burrows, droppings, and chemicals produced by living things.
A preserved burrow counts as a fossil even when no bones survive.
Chemical fossils can record life that left behind no visible body.
Note
Paleontologists use the word more widely than the everyday sense does, because a fossil need not be the organism itself. Shells count, and so do imprints, burrows, coprolites (fossilized dung) and chemicals that living things produced. A burrow in stone is as much a fossil as a bone. Taken together, all such evidence is called the fossil record, the collocation scientists most often reach for.
- 3Anything seen as extremely old, no longer in use, or badly out of date.
Her flip phone is a fossil next to everyone else's smartphones.
Critics dismissed the policy as a fossil from a bygone era.
Similarrelic, dinosaur, anachronism, antique, throwback
- 4An elderly person regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned or behind the times.
He grumbled that management was run by a bunch of fossils.
To the interns, the senior partner was just a fossil set in his ways.
Similarfogey, dinosaur, fuddy-duddy, relic, square
Note
An insult, though sometimes a teasing one: in Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897), a character shouts "Come out of that, you fossils!" through a window. The sting lies in being stuck, not merely old. That is why H. Rider Haggard, in She (1886–87), first denies any disrespect before calling learned men fossils who harden by following the same paths too persistently. Use it only where mockery is welcome.
- 5A word that survives in modern use only as part of a fixed expression, no longer appearing on its own.
'Kith' is a fossil, appearing today only in the phrase 'kith and kin.'
Several fossils linger in English, trapped inside idioms no one analyzes anymore.
Note
Linguists borrowed the image straight from the rock. A word that no longer lives on its own survives inside a set phrase, the way a shell survives in stone. Used alone, fossil here is shorthand for the fuller term fossil word. The longer form is the clearer choice wherever the paleontological meaning might intrude.
Practice
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Origin
From French fossile, from Latin fossilis ("something which has been dug up"), from fodio ("I dig up").