radioactive dating

British

noun

another term for radiometric dating

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

radioactive dating Cultural

A process for determining the age of an object by measuring the amount of a given radioactive material it contains. If one knows how much of this radioactive material was present initially in the object (by determining how much of the material has decayed), and one knows the half-life of the material, one can deduce the age of the object.

Discover More

The best known example of radioactive dating employs carbon 14, a radioactive isotope of carbon.

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:

radioactive dating

But new radioactive dating techniques suggest Mrs Ples, and the others discovered around her, are actually one million years older than thought.

From BBC ● Jun. 28, 2022

Using a new and improved radioactive dating technique, researchers discovered that paintings in three different caves were created more than 64,800 years ago.

From The Verge ● Feb. 22, 2018

The discovery of radioactivity and radioactive dating enabled geologists to determine the age of certain rocks and fossils.

From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2018

This result is similar to the age determined for the maria from radioactive dating of returned samples—3.3 to 3.8 billion years old.

From Textbooks ● Oct. 13, 2016

The age of the bones was determined from radioactive dating of a layer of cindery volcanic debris near the fossils.

From Time Magazine Archive

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023