subterrain

The bedrock or rock layer that lies beneath the soil and superficial features of an area.

In this way at least a crude picture of the subterrain can be built up during the survey.

Two subterrains have been recognised, separated by thrust boundaries: a) Baltic Cover Thrust Sheets b) Crystalline Basement Thrust Sheets

A cave or underground room.

Subterrains have been found in almost all the nations of antiquity; but philosophers have put themselves to little trouble to discover the motives for making these excavations, which were much varied in their forms.

At the latter place you will see human habitations scooped in the rock, and families living in subterrains — what is the word ? — caverns.

An underground region.

The land under Rabbit seems to move, with the addition of yet another citizen to the subterrain of the dead.

Her roar of determination echoing throughout the subterrain, she made the leap with a foot to spare, but landed hard, and the pain of the sharp rock on her bare soles made her somersault forward not once but three times.

An underlying basis or undercurrent.

The roots of the misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism that indelibly mark Modernism are to be found in the subterrain of changing sexual and political mores that constituted belle époque Faubourg society, and it is here that the story of these women begins — in Edith Wharton's drawing room.

For her and others, statements reverberated in enduring moral subterrains.

Synonym of subterranean.

Some skinks have adopted a subterrain life and have dispensed with their limbs.

The secondary chamber, however, was tapped and the rock-melt, previously stored in this domain, moved sidewards through a subterrain outlet of the chamber.