(n.) A hollow cylinder of wickerwork, like a basket without a bottom. Gabions are made of various sizes, and filled with earth in building fieldworks to shelter men from an enemy's fire.
(n.) An openwork frame, as of poles, filled with stones and sunk, to assist in forming a bar dyke, etc., as in harbor improvement.
Example Sentences:
(1) Heselden, a former miner, used his redundancy money to make a fortune from manufacturing gabions, portable metal cages filled with sand or soil for blast protection at military bases and flood defence.
(2) "He protected the armies and peace-keeping forces of the world with his greatest invention, the Bastion Concertainer," said Chris Robinson, senior manager of the Hesco company whose modernised version of Roman defensive gabions - baskets filled with stones and crammed together to create makeshift walls - are used everywhere from Afghanistan to the flood levees of New Orleans.
(3) Updating the medieval defence system of gabions - baskets filled with stones and crammed together to create makeshift walls - he patented the Bastion, which proved an immediate bestseller for his Hesco firm.
(4) In front of each house are gabion walls, gabion being the form of construction used in road embankments, where loose stones are placed in wire cages.
(5) He invented a new version of the medieval gabion – baskets filled with stone or rubble which have been adapted in modern times to line riverbanks and road cuttings.
(6) Like the building, the car park is raised up on a defensive berm, surrounded by gabion walls and hedgerows, reinforcing the feeling that this alien spaceship is cut off from the surrounding streets.
Knickknack
Definition:
(n.) A trifle or toy; a bawble; a gewgaw.
Example Sentences:
(1) It is a theatrically cluttered space full of her varied knickknacks, including cushions embroidered with images of her beloved dogs , a DVD of a BBC docudrama on Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor and, quizzically, a book titled The Married Kama Sutra.