flinders
1 Americanplural noun
noun
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Matthew, 1774–1814, English navigator and explorer: surveyed coast of Australia.
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a river in NE Australia, flowing NW to the Gulf of Carpentaria. 520 miles (837 km) long.
plural noun
Etymology
Origin of flinders
1400–50; late Middle English flendris, perhaps < Scandinavian; compare Norwegian flindra splinter; perhaps akin to flint
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
He’s been at it since “Independence Day” in 1996 when aliens blasted the White House to flinders.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 4, 2022
A stack of old Washington Post stories on the District’s street nomenclature had been reduced to flinders.
From Washington Post
Fishing craft were splintered, fishermen's shacks blown to flinders.
From Time Magazine Archive
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Now, with their summer homes smashed to flinders, with even their beach, real estate so devastated that many an owner thought of letting it go in default of taxes, this opposition was silenced.
From Time Magazine Archive
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The infinite threatened to make all motion impossible, while the void threatened to smash the nutshell universe into a thousand flinders.
From "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife
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Lead author Associate Professor Trevor Worthy of Flinders University says the fossils reveal a bird community unlike anything seen in New Zealand today.
From Science Daily ● Jun. 23, 2026
"If they think it's gone well, it's because nothing has gone wrong," says Giselle Bastin, an associate professor at Flinders University with a research interest in Australia's relationship with the monarchy.
From BBC ● Apr. 18, 2026
Researchers at Flinders University have now developed a promising new approach that could help remove some of the hardest-to-capture forms of these long-lasting pollutants from water.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 8, 2026
The fossils were examined by paleontologists from Flinders University and Canterbury Museum, working alongside volcanologists Joel Baker from the University of Auckland and Simon Barker of Victoria University of Wellington.
From Science Daily ● Mar. 26, 2026
Flinders was returning home when the state of his rotten vessel forced him to put into the Mauritius, which then belonged to France.
From Australian Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil by Willoughby, Howard
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.