substratum

The message and the relentless pursuit of perfection it implored served as the substratum of Eric Musselman’s life.

From Seattle Times ● Mar. 22, 2023

In 2018, it’s easy to dismiss the concept of Queer Eye as reductive: five gay men, possessing expertise across the fashion and lifestyle substratum, make over a hapless straight man.

From The Guardian ● Feb. 7, 2018

C Horizon: This is substratum and is a zone of mechanical weathering.

From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2017

In addition to the rich biodiversity, they discovered that corals and other “community encrusters” were living on the pipe as a substratum.

From Slate ● Nov. 10, 2015

There was no kindness, no gentleness to this departure; nothing human, but rather a degeneration into some demonic substratum of the body that had waited to lay waste to all the lineaments of grace.

From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party" by M.T. Anderson

"Destructive human activities, like seafloor dredging, which razes entire marine communities, have turned seafloors into structurally simplified habitats with little settlement substrata or localised adult oysters to seed recovery," says Dr McAfee.

From Science Daily ● May 9, 2024

This substrata of despondency adds ballast to a novel that sometimes seems to want to drift off, like a hot-air balloon, into an ionospheric layer of pure twinkle and whimsy.

From New York Times ● Feb. 4, 2019

As if building a layer cake, he and his crew applied the substrata, the flashing, the shingles, the roll roofing.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 28, 2018

Carrie Coon in this scene is a tour-de-force, telling a story that’s either an intensely spiritual pilgrimage to the substrata of existence or a lie that gets her to sleep at night.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 5, 2017

In some places it was rotten and blown away, disclosing coarse granulated substrata.

From The Home of the Blizzard Being the Story of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914 by Sir Douglas Mawson