First recorded in 1925–30
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
But if we are to experience a revival of the studia humanitatis—even as machine “intelligence” threatens to strip-mine the whole human archive—it will come through late-modern doubt and critique and from a new romanticism too.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 27, 2025
If making modern batteries requires us to strip-mine the ocean for ingredients, shouldn’t science assess in advance what toll that might take on an ecosystem we just found out about?
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 21, 2023
The Steelers’ refusal to strip-mine the roster and start over is now paying off.
From New York Times ● Oct. 21, 2020
NSO Group is an Israeli cyber-intelligence firm known for developing software that can take control of a cell phone and strip-mine it for data.
From The New Yorker ● Oct. 9, 2019
Strip-mine planting is better than none at all, but such soil as is left after a strip-mine operation is hardly the best.
From Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting Rochester, N.Y. August 31 and September 1, 1953 by Northern Nut Growers Association
The video also whirls through black-and-white landscapes of created objects—paper trees, a cardboard strip mine, a mirror lake.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 12, 2026
The viewer floats over slums, a strip mine, an artisanal sulfur mine.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 12, 2023
In 2021, a former Democratic state auditor in Kentucky announced a massive utility-scale solar farm atop a strip mine in Martin County.
From Salon ● Apr. 12, 2023
The decision will accelerate the closure of some of Europe’s most polluting power plants and a vast lignite strip mine in the west of the country.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 4, 2022
There were news vans set up like permanent trailer parks—surrounding the strip mine, outside the school, and along US Route 30.
From "Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story" by Nora Raleigh Baskin
The Nature Conservancy is exploring the possibility of renewables development on some 13,000 acres of strip-mined land on the 253,000 acres it owns in Kentucky, Virginia, and east Tennessee.
From Salon ● Apr. 12, 2023
Most crucially for Williams, freed people’s basic dignity had been strip-mined, their fragile psyches fractured.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 17, 2023
That’s a concern, given the number of communities nestled in Appalachia’s strip-mined mountains.
From Scientific American ● Aug. 3, 2022
Nevertheless, with demand for nickel for electric vehicles growing exponentially, more and more strip-mined nickel is headed for electric vehicles, despite the cost.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 8, 2022
The making of this classic drama is a story that’s been told, retold, psychoanalyzed and strip-mined for leftovers — see “The Godfather: The Corleone Family Cookbook,” just one of a library’s worth of spinoff books.
From Washington Post ● Dec. 22, 2021
Today, in Perry County in eastern Kentucky, on thousands of square miles of land laid bare by various strip-mining companies, elk are now thriving.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 29, 2026
Among other effects, the firings “essentially destroyed” the division tasked with policing coal strip-mining operations, the 1990 analysis observed — damage that still had not been repaired a decade later, if ever.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 13, 2023
The associated increased demand for nickel is accelerating strip-mining of tropical forests and incurring other negative consequences in Indonesia and the Philippines.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 8, 2022
So when I think about something like "Riverdance," which became this big modern symbol of Irishness around the world, a lot of people complained about it as strip-mining traditional Irish culture and all that.
From Salon ● Mar. 17, 2022
He passed a strip-mining works, huge blue arc lights burning in the dim midwinter daylight.
From "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman
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.
