subterrain

English

Etymology

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

Noun

subterrain (countable and uncountable, plural subterrains)

1. (geology) The bedrock or rock layer that lies beneath the soil and superficial features of an area.
   • 1982, The Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society:

     In this way at least a crude picture of the subterrain can be built up during the survey.

   • 1985, Rodney A. Gayer, The Tectonic evolution of the Caledonide-Appalachian Orogen:

     Two subterrains have been recognised, separated by thrust boundaries: a) Baltic Cover Thrust Sheets b) Crystalline Basement Thrust Sheets

   • 1999, Geology of the Pacific Ocean - Volume 14, Issues 4-6, page 548:

     The Kabarginskiy subterrain is represented by rocks of the Upper Proterozoic and Lower Paleozoic, in the form of a band of sublatitudinal strike running through the northern part of the region.

   • 2004, Giuliano F. Panza, Ivanka Pakaleva, Concettina Nunziata, Seismic Ground Motion In Large Urban Areas, →ISBN, page 1036:

     Although our conclusions follow from the numerical analyses of a specific case of the city of Zagreb, they are valid wherever the subterrain is complex enough to produce significantly different raypaths when the local soil is considered instead of the bedrock.

2. A cave or underground room.
   • 1833, John Billington, The Architectural Director: Being an Approved Guide to Architects:

     Subterrains have been found in almost all the nations of antiquity; but philosophers have put themselves to little trouble to discover the motives for making these excavations, which were much varied in their forms.

   • 1890, Sabine Baring-Gould, Jacquetta and Other Stories, page 104:

     At the latter place you will see human habitations scooped in the rock, and families living in subterrains — what is the word ? — caverns.

   • 1984, George Stanley Faber, The Origin of Pagan Idolatry - Volume 3, page 260:

     Like the subterrain of mount Olivet, it resembled the mouth of an oven or a well ; and its diameter was at the most four cubits.

3. An underground region.
   • 2006, John Updike, Rabbit is Rich, →ISBN:

     The land under Rabbit seems to move, with the addition of yet another citizen to the subterrain of the dead.

   • 2011, Mike Wild, The Trials of Trass Kathra, →ISBN:

     Her roar of determination echoing throughout the subterrain, she made the leap with a foot to spare, but landed hard, and the pain of the sharp rock on her bare soles made her somersault forward not once but three times.

   • 2011, Mason Joiner, Bantam: A Novella, →ISBN, page 114:

     You are in a private penitentiary in the subterrain of Antarctica.

   • 2013, Robert H. T. W. Nieder, Everything Is Just Yesterday with Lots of Tomorrows, →ISBN, page 220:

     Welcome to the subway system of New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or commonly called the MTA by everyone but the residents who will simply tell you they get on a train or ride the subway because in Manhattan all rail transport is underground unlike the outlying boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx where the trains climb out of this subterrain and are raised above ground on rail tracks supported by steel girders, hence the El, common speak for the elevated.

4. An underlying basis or undercurrent.
   • 1986, Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940, page ix:

     The roots of the misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism that indelibly mark Modernism are to be found in the subterrain of changing sexual and political mores that constituted belle époque Faubourg society, and it is here that the story of these women begins — in Edith Wharton's drawing room.

   • 2003, Robert R. Desjarlais, Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths Among Nepal’s Yolmo Buddhists, →ISBN:

     For her and others, statements reverberated in enduring moral subterrains.

   • 2010, Michael Funk Deckard, Peter Losonczi, Philosophy Begins in Wonder, →ISBN:

     Thus, I do not use the term interchangeably with physicotheology, which I regard as a subterrain of natural theology, focusing particularly on purposive and adaptive design manifested in nature.

   • 2017, Marilyn Fleer, Bert van Oers, International Handbook of Early Childhood Education, →ISBN, page 130:

     In moving the subterrain of inquiry, the temporal scales of our memorying and becoming (Grosz 1999) of wild, alien, uncanny and irreal experiences of the vital environments of vibrant nature are worth speculating about for further inquiry into both the enablements and constraints of those body~space relations of children's dromospherical timescapes with the Anthrop/obscene.

Adjective

subterrain (comparative more subterrain, superlative most subterrain)

1. Synonym of subterranean
   • 1949, Walter Reginald Brook Oliver, The moas of New Zealand and Australia, page 4:

     Some skinks have adopted a subterrain life and have dispensed with their limbs.

   • 1975, Annali di geofisica - Volume 28, page 353:

     The secondary chamber, however, was tapped and the rock-melt, previously stored in this domain, moved sidewards through a subterrain outlet of the chamber.

   • 1988, Vincent DiPietro, Gregory Molenaar, John Brandenburg, Unusual Mars Surface Features, page 45:

     Some of the scientific explanations that promote natural formation include wind faceting and shifting of subterrain plates (Marsquakes ) .

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