Definition of "excreta" [ex•cre•ta]

• Waste matter, such as sweat, urine, or feces, discharged from the body. (noun-plural)

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.

• "Of the two and a half million people who live there every drop of liquid or other human excreta is taken out in buckets and baskets slung on bamboo poles and borne on the shoulders of the patient, willing, human carrier, all destined for the land as a precious and priceless offering."
• "Every drop of that human excreta is a valuable asset and provides the means of fertilizing their farms and gardens, and is treasured up and used with a care unthought of in our own country, and is dealt out to the soil which is thereby fertilized to an extent that no soil in any other country is fertilized."
• "Probably the best known contrivance for deodorizing the excreta is the dry earth system as applied in the earth closet, in which advantage is taken of the deodorizing properties of earth."