dry rot
3
6.3
- noun
- /draɪ rɑt/
- Specialized
:
podredumbre seca
- The contractor discovered dry rot in the floor joists, making the structure unsafe.
- dry rot fungus
- termites and dry rot
- mildew and dry rot
Examples
-
A little dry rot, selective damp, some fungus here and there.
-
The home sat on twelve acres adjacent to Brices Creek, and he'd worked on the wooden fence that lined the other three sides of the property, checking for dry rot or termites and replacing posts when he had to.
Fiction book (1998) -
Means some of your trees might have dry rot.
-
I could smell the dry rot of the house when we got out of the car.
Fiction book (1994) -
The smell of dry rot was even stronger inside the house.
Fiction book (1994) -
Oh, it smells like dry rot in there.
-
You don't want dry rot.
-
It is like a house filled with dry rot.
Blog text (6) -
That's what's doing the damage... dry rot.
-
When we bought them from you promises were made about plumbing, about dry rot, about roofing materials.
Synonyms
24
1.6
The breaking down of things like food or wood by bacteria and mold
How Damaging
Surface Forms
Morphology
The components 'dry' (not wet) and 'rot' (breakdown by microbes) together suggest a kind of decay associated with dryness, so a B1 learner could plausibly infer this is a form of wood decay. However, 'dry rot' is a specific, somewhat technical and paradoxical diagnosis (rot that affects apparently dry wood), so the precise pathological meaning is not fully predictable from the parts alone.
Etymology
Dry rot comes from what people saw when a fungus attacked wood: the wood looked very dry and crumbled into powder. The words dry and rot show that picture, so today dry rot means 'a fungus that makes wood dry, crumbly and weak'.