Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A covered hole or pit for receiving drainage or sewage, as from a house.
- n. A filthy, disgusting, or morally corrupt place.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A sunk chamber, cistern, or well in a drain or privy, to receive the sediment or filth.
- n. Figuratively, any foul or fetid receptacle.
Wiktionary
- n. An underground pit where sewage is held.
- n. by extension A filthy place.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A cistern in the course, or the termination, of a drain, to collect sedimentary or superfluous matter; a privy vault; any receptacle of filth.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a covered cistern; waste water and sewage flow into it
Etymologies
- By folk etymology (influence from pool) from earlier cesperalle, alteration of Middle English suspiral, from Middle French souspirail ("air hole"), from soupirer, souspirer ("to sigh, breathe"), from Latin suspirare. (Wiktionary)
- Perhaps alteration (influenced by pool1) of obsolete cesperalle, drainpipe, from Middle English suspiral, vent, from Old French sospirail, breathing hole, from souspirer, to breathe, from Latin suspīrāre, to sigh; see suspire. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The people of city X or county Y can be relied upon not to turn their community into a cesspool without the state and federal governments telling them what a cesspool is and is not.”
Sound Politics: Why Is Seattle Such a Wuss About Strip Clubs?
“Notice the crawler across the bottom of the screen capture, “Three people get caught in cesspool” … would that be Bush, Cheney and Rice?”
Think Progress » VIDEO: 8th General Calls For Rumsfeld’s Resignation
“I hope the judge doesn’t see, or I’m in cesspool of trouble.”
“The meme is that anytime anyone brings up that conservatives were dead wrong and acted like racist idiots when it came to Apartheid, the response is that modern South Africa is a cesspool, which is nottrue.”
“The meme is that anytime anyone brings up that conservatives were dead wrong and acted like racist idiots when it came to Apartheid, the response is that modern South Africa is a cesspool, which is not true.”
“We also publish and link to some stuff my readers would call cesspool material, but I do it because there is value in the broadest possible conversation in our community.”
Nervous About Link Journalism? Ignore Web’s ‘Cesspool’ And Tap Its ‘Natural Spring’ - Publishing 2.0
“A cesspool is a charming apartment compared with the old Bog-woman's brewery.”
“Weeks later five officials from the cash-strapped Detroit Public School system, long known as a cesspool of fraud and mismanagement, got criminally charged for operating an illegal scheme in which they openly stole tens of thousands of dollars from the system, took illegal kickbacks and paid friends who never did any work for the district.”
“A former Richmond City Sheriff's deputy, whose property was described as a cesspool of filth and malnourished pit bulls, was convicted of multiple dog-fighting and animal cruelty charges today in Henrico County Circuit Court.”
“The "Jewel of the Caribbean" is now a desolate cesspool, that is exporting almost no sugar.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘cesspool’.
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miserable circumstances
describing living arrangements from the less-than-stellar, to the sordid
burrow, garret, ghetto, hovel, hut, lean-to, cavern, shack, shanty, shed, slum, tenement and 59 more...
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The insulting ones
ingrate, sycophant, inane, wanton, pompous, vitriolic, ghastly, cesspool, abhor, highfalutin, obsequious, insidious and 25 more...
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Favorites
disparage, partisan, cupidity, hokum, tussle, odious, dastardly, overture, plane, chronic, peering, peer and 328 more...
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Words To Use In Creative Writing
hag-ridden, light-heeled, wendigo, longshanks, fatuous, insipid, sodden, bulging, sycophantic, uncourtly, gauche, assuasive and 174 more...
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I do not like them, Sam I Am
Words that, for various reasons, I wish we could do without.
copacetic, gamut, horehound, lewd, membrane, metrics, mucous, mucus, negligee, nostril, odious, odor and 143 more...
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poonis's Words
windswept, brouhaha, nocuous, sanguine, dissonance, diatribe, homunculus, rancor, stupor, resplendent, anecdote, splay and 125 more...
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Words grabbed from real life conversa...
If I've seen it, heard it, or marvelled at it, I'll stick it here.
cruft, ermine, redundant, shakespearean, camino, marvelous, stupendous, chagrin, shaven, sleek, smug, stillness and 325 more...
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Webbie Debbie's
portend... omen.../whats to come
glum plumportend, sotto, azure, idly, glum, morose, sidelong, Mary Blair, rendering, dubious, winsome, humongous and 100 more...
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Wrapped up in books
I'm reading books. And there are words and phrases I come upon for the first time, or that are used with usages that are new to me.
So, this is just a plain list of those words. Don't expect ...hobble, mackerel, crone, cavort, hoyden, rheumy, scatter, hiss, recoil, trundle, shatter, flaxen and 200 more...
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Ugliest Words Ever
words that I refuse to say out loud.
tuna, uranus, bulbous, vaginal, rectum, cunnilingus, flatulance, pedagogy, blooper, booger, beefy, polyp and 116 more...
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nfrank's Words
antediluvian, equivocate, inchoate, denouement, effulgent, edify, endemic, palimpsest, apropos, circumnavigate, circumlocution, cognoscente and 484 more...
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Favourites
wither, pallid, evanescent, enamour, discovery, smoky, tempest, pantheon, fatuous, revenant, aquatic, escapist and 102 more...
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Words Words and more Words
ruckus, bustle, ominous, odious, abominable, atrocious, appal, abysmal, dismal, calamity, debacle, fiasco and 231 more...
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C is for Caddyshack
My C Words
cavalcade, charlie browniest, cakewalk, clambake, caboose, cadaver, caddyshack, cadillac, cahoots, calaboose, cannonball, canopy and 145 more...
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Words from "The Ghost Map"
"The Ghost Map", by steven Johnson, is a fascinating account of the (successful) investigation by two men, John Snow and Henry Whitehead, into the means by which cholera is transmitted, following t...
ghost map, epidemiology, dot map, voronoi diagram, index case, cholera, experimentum crucis, vibrio cholerae, microbe, germ theory, public health, animalcula and 61 more...
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mmalone's Words
miasma, kitsch, equipoise, pinion, harbinger, mirabilis, annus mirabilis, skein, bulwark, capricious, fortuitous, planetesimal and 233 more...
Tweets
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