ATTRITION • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Attrition

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/ətrˈɪʃən/ Listen

Attrition

noun

Erosion by friction. Synonyms: abrasion, corrasion, detrition.

The wearing down of rock particles by friction due to water or wind or ice. Synonyms: abrasion, detrition, grinding.

Sorrow for sin arising from fear of damnation. Synonyms: contriteness, contrition.

A wearing down to weaken or destroy.

The act of rubbing together; wearing something down by friction.

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"Attrition" Quotes from Famous Books

... human being as I remember seeing outside of a regular museum or tent-show. His black coat shines as if it had been polished; and it has been polished on the wearer's back, no doubt, for the arms and other points of maximum attrition are particularly smooth and bright. Round shoulders,—stooping over some minute labor, I suppose. Very slender limbs, with bends like a grasshopper's; sits a great deal, I presume; looks as if he might straighten them out all of a sudden, and jump instead ...

— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... ring had been builded when Runyon & Bulger's Mighty United Railroad Shows pitched their tents on the occasion of their annual Spring engagement. That had been in early May and this was summer's third month; the attrition of the weather had worn down the sharp edges of that low turfen parapet; by rights, too, there should have been much sawdust and much smell of the same and a center pole rising like one lone blasted ...

— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... in four prime elements of victory: first, in his ability to wear Lee down by sheer attrition if other means failed; next, in his own magnificent army; then in Sherman's; and lastly in Sheridan's cavalry. His supply and transport services were nearly perfect, even in his own most critical eyes. "There never ...

— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood

... crept out on the beach, and in order to prevent the continuous attrition of the surf upon the outer edge of it from befouling the white-sand bathing-beach farther up the Bight of Tyee, The Laird had driven a double row of fir piling parallel with and beyond the line of breakers. This ...

— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... certainly tinctured some part of the character of this mighty genius; and, without some tendency towards which, genius—I mean that kind which depends on the imaginative power—perhaps cannot exist to great extent. The wheels of a machine, to play rapidly, must not fit with the utmost exactness, else the attrition diminishes ...

— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

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