1821 J. Taylor Trans. Geol. Soc. 5 360 Sream Tim..is often..covered by an overburden, as the streamers call it.

1832 Trans. Royal Geol. Soc. Cornwall 4 181 The immense quantity of overburden, (i.e. the disintegrated rock and diluvium) to be removed, before the bed of good roofing slate can be quarried, must..be a great drawback on the profits of this undertaking.

1894 Times 27 Feb. 10/3 The overburden is a reddish clay soil of an average depth of 10 ft.

1964 Australasian Post (Melbourne) 6 Feb. 21/1 Bulldozers have begun clearing overburden to get at the veins of the ‘jade’ beneath.

1971 C. J. White Introd. Coal Mining Industry vii. 65 The workable thickness of coal is more than 100 feet, but in places the thickness of overburden to be removed is 400 feet.

1994 Daily Tel. 24 Mar. 25/8 What gets between the miners and the gold are millions of tons of overburden which has to be removed before they can get at the final few thousand tons of pay dirt.

1948 K. Terzaghi & R. B. Peck Soil Mech. in Engin. Pract. ii. 68 With respect to the present overburden, the clay on the right-hand side is a precompressed soft clay, and that on the left-hand side is a normally loaded soft clay.

1968 G. N. Smith Elem. Soil. Mech. iv. 88 The overburden pressure at a point in a soil mass is simply the weight of the material above it. The effective overburden is the pressure from this material less the pore water pressure.

1970 Daily Tel. 27 June 2/5 The pipeline was laid in December 1967..but the unexpectedly heavy scouring action of the bottom waves in the shallow North Sea soon removed the two foot overburden.

1989 J. P. Mallory In Search of Indo-Europeans vii. 207 In the overburden of the graves there were found the bones of domestic horse, cattle and sheep/goat.

1955 Proc. Colorado Sci. Soc. 16 102/1 Overburden,..a term used by geologists and engineers in several different senses. By some it is used to designate material of any nature, consolidated or unconsolidated, that overlies a deposit of useful materials, ores, or coal, especially those deposits that are mined from the surface by open cuts. As employed by others overburden designates only loose soil, sand, gravel, etc., that lies above the bedrock. The term should not be used without specific definition.

1969 Civil Engin. (U.S.) June 43/2 A more detailed soil investigation of the upper 50 ft or so of the overburden..showed that the allowable bearing capacity was only about 200 to 300 psf, much too low for the proposed bridge foundations.

1986 New Yorker 10 Mar. 89/1 By the middle nineteen-seventies, nature had removed a mile of overburden.