exhume
/ɛksˈ(h)juːm
/ /ɪɡˈzjuːm /verb [with object]
1Dig out (something buried, especially a corpse) from the ground: the bodies were exhumed on the orders of a judge...
- The Pope was buried in the grottoes underneath St Peter's Basilica, on the site where Pope John XXIII had been laid to rest until his corpse was exhumed for public display upstairs in the basilica.
- I had already seen some photographs of the corpses being exhumed and reburied, and of the cemetery being built.
- Seven years later, he exhumed her corpse to rescue the sheaf of poems that, in a Romantic fit, he had buried with her.
Synonyms
disinter, dig up, unearth, bring out of the ground
rare disentomb, unbury, ungrave
1.1 Geology Expose (a land surface) that was formerly buried: various landforms have been exhumed from beneath a covering of Triassic sediments...
- However, it is possible that this effect may be found wherever Mesozoic faults are exhumed to the sea bed or surface, and exhumation data measured in adjacent fault blocks should be projected across these faults with some circumspection.
- The rocks exposed in the central Aegean region, in the area of the Cyclades, are generally Alpine metamorphic rocks and Miocene granites, which were unroofed by extension and erosion, being exhumed by the end of the Miocene.
- The metamorphic core complex is thus formed as mid-crustal rocks are exhumed by tectonic unroofing in an extensional setting.
Origin
Late Middle English: from medieval Latin exhumare, from ex- 'out of' + humus 'ground'.