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.

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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.

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

From BBC

We date meteorites using the same tool of geology that we use to date Earthly rocks: radioactive dating.

From Scientific American

The ages of the oldest known chemical elements are also approximately 15 billion years—a number that comes from radioactive dating techniques.

From Scientific American

The Earth is generally assumed to be roughly 4.7 billion years old, utilizing radioactive dating that uses uranium decay, according to NASA.

From Fox News

The scientists were also surprised when they received results of the radioactive dating of 11 mounds.

From New York Times

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