(v. t.) To cut; to form or shape by cutting; to make by incision, hewing, or the like.
(v. t.) To fortify by cutting a ditch, and raising a rampart or breastwork with the earth thrown out of the ditch; to intrench.
(v. t.) To cut furrows or ditches in; as, to trench land for the purpose of draining it.
(v. t.) To dig or cultivate very deeply, usually by digging parallel contiguous trenches in succession, filling each from the next; as, to trench a garden for certain crops.
(v. i.) To encroach; to intrench.
(v. i.) To have direction; to aim or tend.
(v. t.) A long, narrow cut in the earth; a ditch; as, a trench for draining land.
(v. t.) An alley; a narrow path or walk cut through woods, shrubbery, or the like.
(v. t.) An excavation made during a siege, for the purpose of covering the troops as they advance toward the besieged place. The term includes the parallels and the approaches.
Example Sentences:
(1) Its boot always held a bivouac bag, a trenching tool of some sort and a towel and trunks, in case he passed somewhere interesting to sleep, dig, or swim.
(2) The RSC’s Erica Whyman stages a story inspired by a local man, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment’s Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, who was known as the cartoonist of the trenches and survived the war to work at the original Shakespeare Memorial theatre.
(3) Stephen Fisher, one of the archaeologists recording the site, says digging the trenches would also have been training for the men, who would soon have to do it for real, and the little slit trenches scattered across the site, just big enough for one man to cower in, might represent their first efforts.
(4) Upon segregation of the conidium from the phialide cell by conidial wall formation, 'trench-like' invaginations gradually appeared in the plasma membrane and a disorganized rodlet pattern was formed on the outer surface of the maturing conidial wall.
(5) The field was taped off while a mechanical digger clawed at the ground, making parallel trenches in the sandy earth.
(6) Scores of archaeologists working in a waterlogged trench through the wettest summer and coldest winter in living memory have recovered more than 10,000 objects from Roman London , including writing tablets, amber, a well with ritual deposits of pewter, coins and cow skulls, thousands of pieces of pottery, a unique piece of padded and stitched leather – and the largest collection of lucky charms in the shape of phalluses ever found on a single site.
(7) He sees HS2 as a "huge trench across the country where we can learn an awful lot about new sites.
(8) But his attitude gradually hardened, particularly after he reached the trenches.
(9) "It looks solid," said Jean Pascal Zanders, a Belgian expert who runs a blog on chemical weapons called The Trench .
(10) What they learn can be summed up in one word: trenches.
(11) The archaeologists had to wear slippers to preserve the site which, at the bottom of a two-metre trench, picked up much damp.
(12) A variety of cold exposure injuries were discussed, including frostnip, chilblains, trench foot, frostbite, and hypothermia.
(13) Alan Trench, an academic specialising in devolution and adviser to expert government commissions, said: "It's clear that Labour voters generally have concerns about how things are at the moment.
(14) But if trapped deep inside wreckage or an underwater trench, the effectiveness can be hindered.
(15) French troops wearing an early form of gas mask in the trenches during the second Battle of Ypres in 1915.
(16) Keeping within the string lines of your footprint, dig a trench about 15cm deep and lay the foundation stones flat and level.
(17) But according to Wayne Cocroft, an English Heritage expert on wartime archaeology, although 20 other trench training sites have been recorded across Britain, many have been damaged by later development, and both the scale and the state of preservation of the Gosport complex is exceptional.
(18) Working in a location to the southeast of Kathmandu, Paul Tapponnier, an earth scientist at the Earth Observatory of Singapore , and his team dug trenches across the fault and used charcoal to date when it had moved.
(19) There are no trenches, barbed wire fences or tank traps.
(20) Accessory glandular tissues were atrophied and debris filled the trenches of the papillae.