Cards left undealt or discarded in certain card games form what is known as a discard. This term is linked to the verb discard, which means to exclude something or someone, to do without or not to admit.
In some games, therefore, to discard is to leave the cards in hand. Cards that are discarded are considered useless, and through discarding, the intention is to replace them with others that have not yet been dealt and that might be more convenient in the game. See Abbreviation Finder for acronyms related to Discard.
At a general level, discarding is everything that is not useful or that is left over. The disposable is what can be discarded or is disposable. For example: “The most impoverished sectors of the city are fed with the discards of the most luxurious restaurants”, “The team does not have money to hire great figures, so it will have to look for reinforcements among the discards of the other clubs”, ” You cannot build a house with discards from other works: you run the risk that the security conditions are not the best”.
However, in addition to the above, we cannot ignore the fact that within the world of sports it is very common to use the term that we are now analyzing. More specifically, it is used in group disciplines, such as basketball or football, to refer to those players that the coach does not call for a match.
A personal decision of the coach, an injury or the risk of suffering a relapse in an illness are some of the reasons that lead the professional who manages the team to consider that one or more players will not be part of it in a game, that is to say, that they are going to be the discards.
A clear example of this meaning can be the following: “The Spanish coach, Vicente del Bosque, had to establish two discards within the group among the possible players who were going to go to the World Cup and chose Cesc Fábregas and Fernando Torres”.
Also in the health field, the term discard is also used. In this case, it is used to define all those tests that are carried out on a person for any ailment with the clear objective of being able to exclude certain diseases.
In this way, it is common to talk about what is known as ruling out diabetes or ruling out cholesterol, which, as their names indicate, are tests to reject that the person in question suffers from any of these two pathologies that need to have the corresponding treatment.
Discarded material can be thrown in the trash as it is waste (what remains unusable after having completed a job or operation). The reuse of materials is called recycling, a process that gives a new life to what was already considered waste.
In short, it can be said that discarding consists of getting rid of something that, at least for oneself, is of no use at the present time.