dinosaur juice

English

Etymology

From a humorous association of the term fossil fuel with dinosaurs. This is technically incorrect, since petroleum is derived primarily from fossilized zooplankton and algae.

Pronunciation

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Noun

dinosaur juice (uncountable)

1. (slang, humorous, automotive) Any liquid (gasoline, diesel, mineral oil etc.) derived from fossil fuels (mainly petroleum), commonly used in vehicles as fuel or lubricant.

   Synonyms: dino juice, dino-juice, dinojuice, dino oil, dinosaur oil

   • 1999, Jean-Jacques Jura, Rodney Norman Bardin, Balboa Films: A History and Filmography of the Silent Film Studio, McFarland & Company, published 1999, →ISBN, page 157:

     Within the first 50 years of drilling 2,400 wells, over 859,000,000 barrels of petroleum were extracted in Signal Hill and the Long Beach area. The new darling of Long Beach was dinosaur juice, not celluloid, with the city going wild over the revenues generated by the plentiful natural resource oozing below the former stages of the city's movie community.

   • 2002, Paul Wood, False Confessions: A Life in Hawaiʻi, Flying Rabbit Press, published 2002, →ISBN, page 113:

     […] but most of all why are we robbing our grandchildren by wantonly burning up all the world's dinosaur juice?

   • 2003, Aaron P. Frank, Honda Motorcycles, MBI Publishing Company, published 2003, →ISBN, page 188:

     And that's just what runs on dinosaur juice — Honda also manufactures electric bicycles and carts and is constantly experimenting with solar- and other ultralow- and zero-emissions vehicles, […]

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:dinosaur juice.

Synonyms

• See also Thesaurus:petroleum.

Related terms

• dinosaur-burner