Definition of "crater" []

• A bowl-shaped depression at the mouth of a volcano or geyser. (noun)
• A bowl-shaped depression in a surface made by an explosion or the impact of a body, such as a meteoroid. (noun)
• A pit; a hollow. (noun)
• Variant of krater. (noun)
• To make craters in: "The missiles did not . . . crater the airfield” ( Tom Clancy). (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "But isn't there a part of you that wishes that the shiny bottom of the crater is actually the exposed hull of the planet-sized interstellar spacecraft that has been waiting inside it's rocky camouflage for millions of years for intelligent life to discover and re-activate it?"
• "If, however, it does break through, the newly-opened terrestrial stream generally flows in such a quiet and well-defined course, that the deep valley, which we term the crater, remains accessible"
• "The crater from the Ranger impact is not well defined in the existing film database, especially as it appears at the boundary between two framelets."