Definition of "raw material" []

• An unprocessed natural product used in manufacture. (noun)
• Unprocessed material of any kind: These data are the raw material for the analysis. (noun)

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.

• "On her left lay a bundle of the straight, smooth hazel rods called spar-gadsthe raw material of her manufacture; on her right a heap of chips and endsthe refusewith which the fire was maintained; in front a pile of the finished articles."
• "Long, tentacle-like manipulators would extend outward, away from the camouflaged vessel and beneath the surface, to collect the large volume of fossil carbon from which it would extract the other raw material it needed."
• "Until the discovery of Manningham's Diary, Shakespeare was not supposed to have gone beyond these sources, and it was thought something uncertain to which of these he was most indebted for the raw material of his play."