Meaning of Monolith | Babel Free

Definitions

1. An unincorporated community in Kern County, California, United States.
2. A large, single block of stone which is a natural feature; or a block of stone or other similar material used in architecture and sculpture, especially one carved into a monument in ancient times.
   also, attributive
3. Anything massive, uniform, and unmovable, especially a towering and impersonal cultural, political, or social organization or structure.
   also, attributive, figuratively
4. A substrate having many tiny channels that is cast as a single piece, which is used as a stationary phase for chromatography, as a catalytic surface, etc.
5. A dead tree whose height and size have been reduced by breaking off or cutting its branches.
   British

Equivalents

Examples

“Tomb of Napoleon I. [...] Twelve colossal statues, by [James] Pradier, representing as many victories, stand against the pilasters, facing the tomb, consisting of an immense monolith of porphyry, weighing 135,000 lbs., and brought from Lake Onega in Finland at a cost of 140,000fr.”

“Rumour, with her thousand tongues, affirms that the "Prince Albert Memorial" will not take the form of a monolith; we shall not be sorry to learn the fact of some more suitable monument having been decided upon.”

“[...] I do not think that the idea of a serpent with a ball at its mouth is so very palpable a religious symbol, and one so innate, that it should be the very first thing which would occur as an emblem of the great deity of the waters, to aboriginal Egyptians, to monolith-setters in Brittany, to mound-builders in Ohio, to Peruvians and Mexicans.”

“The practice of using large blocks of stone, either as monoliths or as forming parts of structures, has existed from the earliest times in all parts of the world.”

“Similar engines are erected in Yorkshire on concrete foundations, with a top layer of monolith or Bramley Fall stone, costing from £800 to £1000.”

“On 2 April 1901 Doyle wrote to his mother from Rowe's Duchy Hotel at Princetown: [...] We did fourteen miles over the moor to-day and are now pleasantly weary. It is a great place, very sad and wild, dotted with the dwellings of prehistoric man, strange monoliths and huts and graves.”

“Foothold Ruin sits on an isolated sandstone monolith with additional rooms at the base. Access up the monolith is by a set of footholds in the rockface.”

“The width of a monolith is the distance between monolith joints as measured along the axis of the dam. [...] In recent construction, monolith widths have been commonly set at approximately 50 feet but with some structures having monoliths ranging from 30 to 80 feet.”

“The Washington Monument is often described as an obelisk, and sometimes even as a "true obelisk," even though it is not. A true obelisk is a monolith, a pylon formed out of a single piece of stone.”

“[...] Chimney Rock State Park is one of North Carolina's newest state parks. Its most famous landmark is the park's namesake, a spectacular granite monolith known as Chimney Rock, providing panoramic views of Lake Lure, the surrounding mountains, and nearby Piedmont.”

“It was the setting up of generalizations of the first kind in [Charles J.] Fillmore (1966a, b) and (1968a) that awarded case grammar the role of being, besides abstract syntax, the second crack in the transformational monolith of the late sixties.”

“But English society is no monolith, and it is a gross simplification to force it into one mould.”

“Recent scholarship on colonial history has demonstrated that British America was not simply an English but rather a multicultural society. Far from being a homogeneous monolith, colonial society comprised many divergent races and ethnic groups.”

“For whatever reason, one knows that the Senegalese poet-president [Léopold Sédar Senghor] became the Father of the ideology, cleverly weaving a network of cultural contributions and atavistic, essential, and behavioral components into a kind of black monolith hardly acceptable to anyone.”

“Southern Democratic plantation masters' prestige and dominance were equivalent to monolith monarchs. They had influence around the world, especially within the political arena.”

“Intentionally or not, the movie [Ralph Breaks the Internet] makes Disney feel as enormous as the internet itself, containing a series of micro-targeted idiosyncrasies and in-jokes that are nonetheless controlled by a cultural monolith (whether that's Disney or whatever massive corporation owns your local ISP).”

“The conference chairman, Alois Jungbauer, Ph.D., professor at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, defined a monolith as a continuous stationary-phase cast as a homogeneous column in a single piece. Monoliths are further characterized by a highly interconnected network of channels, most with sizes ranging from 1 to 5 µm. The adsorptive surface is directly accessible to solutes as they pass through the column.”

“[W]ork performed by Gough et al. looked at the long-term culture (28 days) of craniofacial fibroblasts seeded on to monolith calcium/sodium phosphate glass surfaces.”

“[page 98] If a stub is to be retained, either for the reasons stated above, or when a tree is to be reduced to a "monolith" [...], unconventional methods of cutting or fracturing (not recommended in BS 3998) may be employed, [...] [page 147] Even dead standing or fallen trees are important, and so owners should be encouraged to be untidy-minded and to leave monoliths or fallen dead wood in situ.”

“Stumps of older fallen trees, known as upright monoliths, have incredible environmental value and can provide a home and food source for insects for decades.”

“Unexpectedly, even some of the monoliths are throwing out new shoots. This is great news, as these trees contain ancient woodland DNA, so are a very valuable seedbank. Further along the site, Penny shows me a famous translocated stump... the Cubbington pear tree. [...] The stump was translocated, and the trunk used as a monolith - but not before dozens of cuttings had been taken, some of which are growing nearby. And the stump? It's already throwing out dozens of new shoots as it's become re-established.”

CEFR level