Avulsion

1. n. The sudden removal of lands or soil from the estate of one man to that of another by an inundation or a current, or by a sudden change in the course of a river by which a part of the estate of one man is cut off and joined to the estate of another. The property in the part thus separated, or cut off, continues in the original owner.
2. n. A tearing asunder; a forcible separation.
3. n. A fragment torn off.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.