All 5 Uses of
excavate
in
The War of the Worlds
- The growing crowd, he said, was becoming a serious impediment to their excavations, especially the boys.†
Chpt 1.3
- At first I scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it has been convenient to describe them first, on account of the extraordinary glittering mechanism I saw busy in the excavation, and on account of the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across the heaped mould near it.†
Chpt 2.2
- When I looked again, the busy handling-machine had already put together several of the pieces of apparatus it had taken out of the cylinder into a shape having an unmistakable likeness to its own; and down on the left a busy little digging mechanism had come into view, emitting jets of green vapour and working its way round the pit, excavating and embanking in a methodical and discriminating manner.†
Chpt 2.2
- And after that I abandoned altogether the idea of escaping by excavation.†
Chpt 2.3 *
- The Martians had taken away the excavating-machine, and, save for a fighting-machine that stood in the remoter bank of the pit and a handling-machine that was buried out of my sight in a corner of the pit immediately beneath my peephole, the place was deserted by them.†
Chpt 2.3
Definition:
to dig out
in various senses, including:
- remove or lay bare -- as when removing top soil to lay a foundation
- find or uncover -- as at an archaeological site
- remove a part -- as a tooth from the gum that surrounds it