spall.

1. To shed or break away in chips, flakes, or slabs from a surface.

2. A small chip or fragment broken from stone or another hard material.

3. To break up or reduce material by chipping it, as with a hammer.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• stone begins to spall
• concrete may spall
• spall away from a surface

On the page

The damp stone had begun to spall beneath the ruined chapel's windows.

Usage notes

Primary category: horror / gothic literary. Lexical Type: Word. Forms: spall; spalls; spalled; spalled; spalling. Noun singular spall; plural spalls. Commonness: uncommon (editorial estimate; not a corpus frequency statistic). Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1; numbered fields keep each relevant meaning separate. Research distinction: Noun small fragment/chip especially stone; transitive chip-reduction; intransitive shedding chips/scales/slabs. Separate spallation cross-reference needs specialist scope review. Individual writer usefulness checked for a distinct physical, ritual, facial or acoustic function. Definitions/examples are original; genre suitability is not an inherent emotional rating. Writing functions: precise physical or ritual description, gothic scene construction. Third-person singular: spalls.