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Building material   /bˈɪldɪŋ mətˈɪriəl/   Listen
Building material

noun
1.
Material used for constructing buildings.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Building material" Quotes from Famous Books



... villas. The towns themselves are badly and irregularly built with foul courts, lanes, and back alleys, reeking of coal smoke, and especially dingy from the originally bright red brick, turned black with time, which is here the universal building material. Cellar dwellings are general here; wherever it is in any way possible, these subterranean dens are constructed, and a very considerable portion of the ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... of stone as a building material was not resorted to, except to a trifling extent, in this country until long after the need of such a solid substance was felt. The early settler contented himself with the log cabin, the corduroy road, and the wooden bridge, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various

... authoritatively, through the French brique, originally a "broken piece," applied especially to bread, and so to clay, from the Teutonic brikan, to break), a kind of artificial stone generally made of burnt clay, and largely used as a building material. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... had now arrived with the building material, and carpenters were put on to erect the hotel. This was not finished until the end of 1879, when it was opened under the ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield

... distributed handsome maps gratis, and courted susceptible Eastern editors. Its water-power was unrivaled; ground for all desirable public buildings, and for a handsome park with ready-grown trees and a natural lake, had been securely provided for by the terms of the company's charter; building material abounded; the water was good; the soil of unequaled fertility; while the company, with admirable forethought, had a well-stocked store on the ground, and had made arrangements to send to the town a skillful physician and ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton

... how to prevent, with his terrible barrage, the bringing up of building material, and even how to hinder the work itself. The consequence is that our trenches are always ready for an assault on his part. Our artillery, which does occasionally put a heavy barrage on the enemy trenches at a great expense of ammunition, cannot cause similar destruction to him. He ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... of Gooseland; the powerful swans, which are very difficult of approach by the hunter, on the other hand breed on the open plain. The swans' nests are so large that they may be seen at a great distance. The building material is moss, which is plucked from the ground within a distance of two metres from the nest, which by the excavation which is thus produced, is surrounded by a sort of moat. The nest itself forms a truncated cone, 0.6 metre high and 2.4 ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... Albanensem,', which has generally been taken to refer to the abandoned camp. It was at this period, then, that the civitas Albanensis arose. The lapis Albanus is a green grey volcanic stone with black and white grains in it (hence the modern name. Deperino). much used for building material. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... on land which belonged to the villages. From this time on, the rest of the village commons in China proper disappeared. Villagers could no longer use the top-soil of the hills as fertilizer, or the trees as firewood and building material. In addition, the hillside estates diverted the water of springs and creeks, thus damaging severely the irrigation works of the villagers in the plains. The estates (chuang) were controlled by appointed managers who often became hereditary managers. The tenants on the estates were ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard

... stone houses in the new capital. Swedish prisoners and merchants from Novgorod were invited to move to St. Petersburg, and no excuse was admitted. Goods could be brought only by boat, and no (p. 169) boat was allowed to land unless it carried a certain number of white stones to be used as building material. He erected churches, and ordered that he should be buried in the Church of St. ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen

... circumstantial evidence would credit them with making preliminary surveys. But of this there is no proof. I have noticed a few things that seem to have been considered by beaver before beginning dam-building,—the supply of food and of dam-building material, for instance, and the location of the dam so as to require the minimum amount of material and insure the creation of the largest reservoir. In making the dam, the beaver usually takes advantage ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... packed them up under the bridge to the narrow outlet of the gorge. Here he began fashioning a fence, by driving aspens into the ground and lacing them fast with willows. Trip after trip he made down for more building material, and the afternoon had passed when he finished the work to his satisfaction. Wildcats might scale the fence, but no coyote could come in to search for prey, and no rabbits or other small game could escape from ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey

... aside the natural longings for home which often assailed him, and threw himself heart and soul into his new duties. Already he felt happier, for he was "out" to draw from the present, from the whole of it, all the building material it contained, and was resolute to use all that material in the construction of a palace, a future based on marble, strong, simple, noble, a Parthenon of the future. Only the weak man looks to omens, is governed ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... colonel, soon permeated all the channels of local enterprise. The barber, out of his profits, began the erection of a row of small houses for coloured tenants. This gave employment to masons and carpenters, and involved the sale and purchase of considerable building material. General trade felt the influence of the enhanced prosperity. Groceries, dry-goods stores and saloons, did a thriving business. The ease with which the simply organised community responded to so slight an inflow of money and energy, was not without a pronounced influence upon ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt

... in the new world. In architecture, therefore, it is not surprising to find the oldest houses and public buildings of the American metropolis of those days reflecting the tendencies of the times across the water. Wood had already ceased to be a cheap building material in England, and although it was abundantly available in America, brick and stone were thought necessary for the better homes, despite the fact that for some years, until sources of clay and limestone ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins

... old buildings having nearly all disappeared. Large and costly business houses and splendid residences have taken their place in the central portion of the city, marble, granite, terra-cotta, iron and steel being largely used as building material. The great prevalence of frame buildings in the residence sections is largely due to the popular belief that they are safer in a locality subject to earthquakes, while the frequent occurrence of earth tremors long restrained the inclination to erect lofty buildings. Not until 1890 was ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... change, but they made it in a half-hearted way; for instead of pulling down the heathen temple, so that not one stone should be left upon another, they allowed the Doric columns to remain and merely filled up the intercolumniations with building material and baptised it into the Christian faith with a coat of whitewash and a new name. In other respects they went on very ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones

... to a tithe of the magnificence of which I have not alluded, I observed carts coming out of the side of a hill, loaded with the whitish stone that composes the building material of Paris. We stopped the carriage, and went into the passage, where we found extensive excavations. A lane of fifteen or twenty feet was cut through the stone, and the material was carted away in heavy square blocks. Piers were ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... before his abbey gate, but Richard Vinnicomb's goods escaped confiscation; and when the great church was sold, as it stood, for building material, he bought it for three hundred pounds, and gave it to the parish. One part of his prayer was granted, for within a year death reunited him to his brother; and in his pious will he bequeathed his "sowle to Allmyhtie ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner

... is well supplied with limestone, which makes an excellent building material. Marble, also, is easily obtained. Along the coast are occasional marshes where ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George

... powdery streets. I saw, however, on a little excursion which I made into the surrounding country, that pleasant little neighborhoods are rising up at no great distance, with their neat houses, their young trees, and their new shrubbery. They have a fine building material at Buffalo—a sort of brown stone, easily wrought—but I was sorry to see that most of the houses built of it, both in the town and country, seemed to have stood ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant

... little distance up the hill from Bardon Mill station is a very pretty little village whose name speaks eloquently of other invaders than the Romans—the village of Thorngrafton (the "ton" or settlement on Thor's "graf" or dyke). Near at hand there are quarries from which the Romans obtained much building material for the Wall; and in one of these old quarries some workmen discovered a bronze vessel full of Roman coins, a few of gold, but most of silver. This was known as the "Thorngrafton Find," and the interesting story of it is ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... the converted idolater is dead against complexity in worship, and for simplicity. He does not want something as like his own old religion as possible, but as different as possible from it; and so we have good building material ready to hand, and a foundation ready laid. "But let every man take ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... meat, and very few vegetables, his diet will be too rich in protein, and too lacking in carbohydrates. On the other hand, if he consumes great quantities of pastry, bread, butter, and tea, his meals will furnish too much energy, and not enough building material.' There, Bertram, don't ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter

... Britain tell the tale of our incredible venture. "Great areas of land had to be cleared, levelled, and drained; barracks had to be built; one camp alone used 42,000 railway truck-loads of building material." There was no time to build new railways, and the existing roads were rapidly worn out. They were as steadily repaired; and on every side new camps sprang up around the ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... think of ourselves. As early as April the house was entirely covered by snow. In this newly drifted snow, passageways were dug connecting directly with the dog huts. Ample room was thus at our disposal without the need on our part of furnishing building material. We had workshops, a blacksmith shop, a room for sewing, one for packing, a storage room for coal, wood, and oil, a room for regular baths and one for steam baths. The winter might be as cold and stormy as it would; it could do us ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... and built a great, splendid fireplace and chimney at one end of the Shop. The work came out so well that I said, "Boys, here is a great scheme—these hardheads are splendid building material." So I advertised we would pay a dollar a load for niggerheads. The farmers began to haul stones; they hauled more stones, and at last they had hauled four thousand loads. We bought all the stone in the dollar limit, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... much!" begged Mary. "By the way, what are they doing to this building? I see the stairways and some of the elevator shafts all littered with building material." ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton

... earthquakes has combined with the influence of the traditional habits of the people to prevent the maturing of a truly monumental architecture. Except for the terraces, gates, and enclosures of their palaces and temples, wood is the predominant building material. It is used substantially as in China, the framing, dovetailing, bracketing, broad eaves and tiled roofs of Japan closely resembling those of China. The chief difference is in the greater refinement and delicacy of the ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... the nonce to take care of himself, the pair of us set out to procure them. Daphne led me to a dense brake wherein immense numbers of these wattles were to be found, and leaving me to cut as many as I could carry, proceeded further afield in quest of building material of another sort I had completed my task and was back in camp preparing my load for use when Daphne returned; and this time she came staggering in under a tremendous load of palm-leaves, which I rightly guessed were to be used ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... the principles of decorative design. Building material of typography paper, types, ink, decorations and illustrations. Handling of shapes. Design of complete book, treating each part. Design of commercial forms and single units. ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton

... on his old clothing, crossed the bridge, and worked all day with all his might trying to gather building material out of the water, save debris from the dam, to clear the village street. At noon he came over and got a drink, and a piece of bread. At night he worked until he could see no longer, and then ate some food from the cupboard and went to bed. He was up and at work ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter

... for a time, and no wonder; but they soon grow accustomed to the new surroundings and go on with their every-day employments as if nothing had happened. The sides of the case make a fine firm wall for their city; they are furnished with plenty of food and building material, and soon they can be seen busy at work clearing their streets, building houses, feeding the babies, and quite contented and happy in their glass city. If, after months of separation, an ant from one half of the divided nest should be put into the other he would ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning

... anon at slow, sedate Caen, as still as the stone for which it is celebrated, and that furnished the building material of Winchester Cathedral; Bayeux, boastful of its antique tapestry; and Dol and Saint Servan, and away beyond, Sainte Michel, so like and yet unlike the like- named Saint Michael's Mount of Cornwall, in our own sea-girt isle that it might have been chipped ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson

... dependence was not placed on promises regarding rehabilitation made during the first flush of sympathy; the words were nevertheless pleasant to the ear at the time. The insurance companies would act promptly and liberally, taking no advantage of any technicality; congress would remit duties on building material for a time, and thus protect the city-builders from the extortions of the material men; the material men roundly asserted that there should be no extortion, no advance in prices, but, on the contrary, all other work should be set aside and precedence ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft

... Babylonia possessed no forests, it had the date palm, which needed scarcely any cultivation. If the alluvial soil yielded little stone, clay, on the other hand, was everywhere. Molded into brick and afterwards dried in the sun, the clay became adobe, the cheapest building material imaginable. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... look for a moment to the first? The food that is taken into the system, or the available portions of the food, is the building material; but the mind is always ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... enclosing fence, and upon his refusal to do so, the soldiers, under orders from their Captain, deliberately cut and threw down the fence, exposing the gardens, meadows and about sixty acres of growing crops to waste. A blacksmith's shop which had been erected on the reserve was demolished, and the building material thrown over the bank. The Captain avowed that he was acting under express orders from the Lieutenant-Governor, which proved ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... loss to know how to account for the somewhat peculiar circumstances, the young architect, going his ordinary rounds of inspection, had seen in a flash that there was something unusual in the disposal of a portion of the building material; which observation, with certain deductions following thereon, had led to the detection and arrest of the criminal. From that time on he had been more and more drawn to the fascination of tracing events ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce

... quarries.] Following the Quingua from Baliwag up its stream, we passed several quarries, where we saw the thickly-packed strata of volcanic stone which is used as a building material. The banks of the river are thickly studded with prickly bamboos from ten to twelve feet high. The water overflows in the rainy season, and floods the plain for a great distance. Hence the many shells of large freshwater mussels which are to be seen lying on ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... While seeking wider markets and the real value of their products, they have been opposed always to any scheme which accomplishes higher prices at the expense of the consumer or of the British workman. They do not believe in import duties on food stuffs, clothing, fuel or building material. Rather do they favor bringing closer together the producer and consumer to the advantage of both. They believe in cheaper money for the development of agriculture and other industries and in such utilization of natural resources that the homes of ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse

... and express charges and all charges appertaining to the transportation of material belonging to individuals, such as exhibits, building material, concession material and supplies, etc., must be prepaid at the point of shipment, and the goods delivered at the exposition clear of all charges of any description ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

... Chicago. As you know, the Pacific Southwestern inherits, from the old narrow-gauge purchase, the right-of-way over Plug Pass and down the valley of the Pannikin. Frisbie wires that the Transcontinental people have begun massing building material at the terminus of their Saguache branch, only twenty miles ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... on most of the major planetoids, a man's home is his castle, even if it's only a hotel room. Raw nickel-iron, the basic building material, is so cheap that walls and doors are seldom made of anything else, so a hotel room is more like a vault than anything else on Earth. Every time I go into one of the hotels on Ceres or Eros, I get the feeling that I'm either a bundle of gold certificates or a particularly obstreperous prisoner ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett

... advices from engineers, decided that this reconstruction work would require four months, even if building material could ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall

... difference. Instead of a great open space in the center of the city, there was a central, park-like space, in the middle of which was a massive pile, circular in shape, and built, like all the rest of the city, of the black, sweating rock which seemed to be the sole building material of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various

... safely allotted to these than to rent proper, since the purchase is also an investment. As a rule, the increase of land value near a growing city will considerably exceed the diminution in the value of the improvements. Indeed, owing to the constant advance of cost of building material in recent years, there is often enhancement rather than ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller

... guests, whose acquaintance it was considered advisable he should make. In the business parts of most western cities iron and stone have now replaced the native lumber, but on their outskirts wood is still employed with admirable effect as a building material, and Nairn's house was an example of the judicious use of the latter. It stood on a rise above the inlet; picturesque in outline, with its artistic scroll-work, Its wooden pillars, its lattice shutters ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... Building material is plenty and cheap. Fish and game in abundance. Good schools and churches will be established at once. Clermont is to be made ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... Mackintosh's advice; and at last came the moment of joy when he was ready for the second poles to project from the ends of the first ones, and a fresh supply of branches. But it was a tedious undertaking at the best, made doubly so by anxiety to reach the end; for each time the supply of building material was exhausted he had to creep back for more, as the men dared not trust their weight far from the ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby

... with concrete and looking like gray images of men. There was a wild flight for the steamer. One of the barges snapped a hawser and it was only by the herculean efforts of the smaller tug that she was kept from collision with the cylinder. Had that tug, loaded down with building material, ever canted against the cylinder, the whole effort would have been ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... uplands. I discovered that some big droves were passing on a certain day, and that the owners and their families were travelling with them in wagons. Accordingly I had a light naachtmaal fitted up as a sort of travelling store, and with my two wagons full of building material joined the caravan. I hoped to do good trade in selling little luxuries to the farmers on the ...
— Prester John • John Buchan

... few, that are well cared for; for the care bestowed on animals has, as a rule, much more influence on the body itself than on their covering.(799) In fisheries, caviar, sturgeon-bladders, oil and whalebone;(800) and in forest-culture, pitch, tar, potash and, to some extent, building material etc., play ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... kill the two birds with one stone. I did not attempt to build up a pecan grove, but instead I came back with the idea firmly impressed that we have a better proposition for the future right here, that we have right here in the North the building material in the shagbark hickory and the black walnut for a nut industry that will rival or even surpass the enviable position the pecan holds today. Was I correct or was I wrong? A second trip last winter has served only to imbed that idea into ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various

... cause the use of iron as ship-building material introduced a difficulty which it was feared would prove very serious. The thousands of tons of iron in a ship must exert a strong attraction on the magnetic needle. Another complication is introduced ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... it should be done. Concrete is made of Portland cement, mixed with sand and water and either broken stone, gravel, cinders, or slag; but if any one thinks that he can mix these together without knowing how and produce good concrete, he will make a bad mistake rather than a good building material. ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan

... so rapidly that it approached equality with that of England, in tonnage. But even before the calamities of our civil war, a change was foreshadowed favorable to England, hostile to the United States. It was the change from sail to steam. The utilization of iron as a ship-building material, the cheapening of fuel, the superior speed, all betokened a radical change in transportation on the principal ocean routes of the world. From the close of 1856 to the outbreak of the rebellion the average loss to the Navigation interests of the United States was two per cent annually. This ratio ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... many changes of owners who included Edward I, Edward III and John of Gaunt, and after being besieged by Stephen against Matilda, by the Barons against Henry III, and by Richard II against Bolingbroke it fell on evil times and was actually sold for forty pounds by the Parliamentary commissioners as building material. The keep is in ruins and the chapel can only be traced in the grassy floor; here may still be seen the old font covered by an iron frame, and the opening of the castle well, in which, as related by Hare, skulls of the wolves which once roamed ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes

... been applied to repeatedly for help in this settlement of Kowaliga. Under the lead of two young college graduates, both of whom I had met while they were students at Fisk University, the colored people with great sacrifice had contributed building material and labor in the construction of a very substantial two-story building with attic and basement, which, however, is yet incomplete and unfurnished. The people with few exceptions, are extremely poor and very ignorant, and have an imperfect idea of what a school means with its ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 2, June, 1898 • Various

... shaft-house and out-buildings, fitting the structures to our limited space. When the fight to retain possession should begin we meant to strike fast and hard; Barrett had already gone the length of bargaining, through a friend in town, for building material and machinery, which were to be rushed out to us in a hurry at the firing of the first gun in what we all knew would be a ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde

... employment. It is true that our harvest was not yet gathered in; but we had been gradually purchasing different kinds of grain—to the amount of 10,000 cwt.—of the Wa-Kikuyu, and had stored it near the lake in granaries, for which the saw-mill had supplied the building material. All this grain was ground by the end of October; and, even if our harvest had failed, the first few thousands of those who were coming would not have had ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... the beginning of my experiment, I see only one bit of good luck that attended it. Building material was cheap during the months in which I had to build so much. Nothing else specially favored me, while in one respect my experiment was poorly timed. The price of pork was unusually low. For three years, ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter



Words linked to "Building material" :   brick, shake, flooring, gunite, fencing material, artefact, wattle and daub, bricks and mortar, roofing material, timber, fencing, sticks and stone, insulating material, stone, cement, shingle, lath and plaster, insulation, artifact, concrete, building block, siding, mortar, covering material, insulant, lumber, staff



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