Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A channel at the edge of a street or road for carrying off surface water.
- n. A trough fixed under or along the eaves for draining rainwater from a roof. Also called regionally eaves spout, eaves trough, rainspout, spouting.
- n. A furrow or groove formed by running water.
- n. A trough or channel for carrying something off, such as that on either side of a bowling alley.
- n. Printing The white space formed by the inner margins of two facing pages, as of a book.
- n. A degraded and squalid class or state of human existence.
- v. To form gutters or furrows in.
- v. To provide with gutters.
- v. To flow in channels or rivulets.
- v. To melt away through the side of the hollow formed by a burning wick. Used of a candle.
- v. To burn low and unsteadily; flicker.
- adj. Befitting the lowest class of human life; vulgar, sordid, or unprincipled: gutter language; the gutter press.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A narrow channel at the eaves or on the roof of a building, at the sides of a road or a street, or elsewhere, for carrying off water or other fluid; a conduit; a trough.
- n. A furrow; especially, a furrow made by the action of water.
- n. A passageway; a secret passage.
- n. plural Mud; mire; dirt.
- n. In Australian gold-mining, the lower auriferous part of the channel of an old river of the Tertiary age, now often deeply covered by volcanic materials and detrital deposits.
- n. In printing, one of a number of pieces of wood or metal, channeled in the center with a groove or gutter, used to separate the pages of type in a form. Also gutter-stick.
- n. In entomology, any groove or elongate depression, especially when it serves as a receptacle for a part or an organ; specifically, a fold or deflexed and incurved space on the posterior wing of a lepidopterous insect, adjoining the inner edge, and embracing the abdomen from above downward when the wings are at rest.
- n. In cabinet-work, etc., a slight depression. Flutings and godroons are always in series; the term gutter is used rather for a single depression or one of two or three.
- To furrow, groove, or channel, as by the flow of a liquid.
- To conduct off, as by a trough or gutter.
- To provide with gutters: as, to gutter a house.
- To become channeled by the flow of melted tallow or wax, as a burning candle.
- To let fall drops, as of melted tallow from a candle.
- n. One who guts fish in dressing them.
- To devour greedily.
- n. In turpentine-making, one of two thin bent strips of metal which are inserted in gashes cut into the face of a tree and serve to couduct resin into a cup.
Wiktionary
- n. A ditch along the side of a road.
- n. A duct or channel beneath the eaves of a building to carry rain water; eavestrough.
- n. A grooves down the sides of a bowling lane.
- n. A large groove (commonly behind animals) in a barn used for the collection and removal of animal excrement.
- n. A space between printed columns of text.
- n. Something distasteful or morally questionable.
- n. UK A drainage channel.
- n. philately an unprinted space between rows of stamps.
- n. The part of a street meant for vehicles.
- adj. Suitable for the gutter; vulgar, disreputable.
- v. of a small flame To flicker as if about to be extinguished.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A channel at the eaves of a roof for conveying away the rain; an eaves channel; an eaves trough.
- n. A small channel at the roadside or elsewhere, to lead off surface water.
- n. Any narrow channel or groove.
- n. (Bowling) Either of two sunken channels at either side of the bowling alley, leading directly to the sunken pit behind the pins. Balls not thrown accurately at the pins will drop into such a channel bypassing the pins, and resulting in a score of zero for that bowl.
- v. To cut or form into small longitudinal hollows; to channel.
- v. rare To supply with a gutter or gutters.
- v. To become channeled, as a candle when the flame flares in the wind.
WordNet 3.0
- v. burn unsteadily, feebly, or low; flicker.
- v. flow in small streams
- n. a worker who guts things (fish or buildings or cars etc.)
- v. wear or cut gutters into
- v. provide with gutters
- n. a tool for gutting fish
- n. a channel along the eaves or on the roof; collects and carries away rainwater
- n. misfortune resulting in lost effort or money
Etymologies
- Anglo-Norman gotere, from Old French goutiere (French gouttière), ultimately from Latin gutta ("drop") (Wiktionary)
- Middle English goter, guter, from Old French gotier, from gote, drop, from Latin gutta. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“What else can they do when the gutter is the only way up?”
Think Progress » Gay marriage amendment dead, pandering lives on.
“A society based on the shoot-out attitudes of the Wild West where winnners are swaggering kings who rule by intimidation and losers are rotting corpses in the gutter is an unhealthy one indeed, even in a world not bristling with nuclear weapons.”
“In the front housesat any rate in a side-street where the Corporation dont interferethe women get into the habit of throwing their refuse out of the front door, so that the gutter is always littered with tea-leaves and bread crusts.”
“The man lying in the gutter is our brother What should we do to help these members of our common family, who are not as well off as we are?”
“A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo said Mr. Paladino is trafficking in "gutter" politics.”
“In book production, the "gutter" is the place where two facing pages meet at the binding.”
“I don't know what sort of pseudo-science you're using here, but from where I'm standing our gutter is perfectly clean -- it's so clean I can actually see pure rainwater flowing over the front edge of it.”
The Huffington Post: Jilly Gagnon: A Global Warming Skeptic Tackles His To-Do List
“Aside from the obvious humor in gutter language, just who was on the right side of that argument?”
“So I went out and purchased a 10 foot length of vinyl rain gutter and cut it to size.”
Rain Gutters As Cable Management Tools | Lifehacker Australia
“Granted, you can find other cord-wrangling solutions, but the rain gutter approach yields impressive results.”
Rain Gutters As Cable Management Tools | Lifehacker Australia
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘gutter’.
-
Visuals
A list of words which yield surprising, beautiful, amusing, or otherwise noteworthy images here on Wordnik.
photochrom, fufluns, thank you, cool l..., postcard, picture postcard, cricket, physiological ill..., Gakuryū Ishii, ametropia, One Froggy Evening, rhodopsin, Santiago Calatrava and 636 more...
-
RELI - Genesis
Protagonists and relevant words in the Book of Creation (Source: King James Bible)
Laban, circumcise, beget, Esau, Rebekah, speckle, Sodom, Pharaoh, Canaanite, Canaan, Jacob, Lot and 1286 more...
-
The Bindery
A list of bookbinding terms and phrases, for assembling new or repairing/reassembling old books.
perfect binding, animal glue, spine, textblock, polyvinyl acetate, double-fan adhesi..., board, backing, rounding, bone, book cloth, pasteboard and 270 more...
-
The Chandlery
Candles, candle-making; photometry, and a couple of oily fish used as light sources.
candle, chandlery, chandry, candle-carriage, candela, candle-power, egg-candling, wax, tallow, paraffin, taper, cerge and 135 more...
-
Fictional music genres
fudgepunk, whangboogie, electrogush, jizzbilly, glambient, queasy listening, chip shop, baroque'n'roll, prog folk, chemo, riant grrl, blingfolk and 584 more...
-
MaRgInS
mArG(a)iNs
bipectinated, gutter, bifid, involute, hives, capybara, crenation, fragrant agrimony, runcinate, ragged, tharos, fringed pink and 20 more...
-
This list is like butter
peanut butter, almond butter, butter of antimony, mineral butter, butter of arsenic, soy nut butter, apple butter, cocoa butter, butter bean, butter clam, butterfly, cacao butter and 72 more...
-
bookwords
Words that apply to the description and condition of books
foxing, cocked, endpaper, scuffing, spine, impression, marginal, covers, browning, edition, printing, dust jacket and 44 more...
-
Twitter favorites
The new favourite words of people on Twitter.
A script searches Twitter for "X is my new favorite word" and adds it to this list.
See also:
unfathomably, glice, cuh, fab, ciggaty, doll, thuggin, oxymoronic, pineapple, succubutt, griming, cheeky and 2369 more... -
The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
-
zanshin's Words
gargoyle, ennui, paradigm, aardvark, verisimilitude, ghoti, tenacity, nescience, guillemet, squonk, maven, moxie and 210 more...
-
Rare Books
Words used in the rare book trade (of which I was once a part). For more about how such books are put together, see hernesheir's excellent The Bindery.
foxing, gilt, headband, bumped, endpaper, leaf, colophon, vellum, laid paper, boards, device, engraving and 168 more...
-
Mary and Max (2009)
Words from 2009 'Mary and Max' film.
muddy, puddle, birthmark, piggyback, pensive, gumnut, pompom, salvage, takeaway, oven, shed, deliberate and 112 more...
-
Philately
Definitions mainly taken from this glossary.
aerogramme, aerophilately, black jack, cachet, cancellation, cinderella, albino, album weed, ambulante, aniline ink, authentication mark, back-of-book and 104 more...
-
South Yorkshire medical terminology
For definitions see the source document.
"All the words and phrases included in this guide are those that have been used by patients during consultations and have been included to assi...winkle, wind pipe, willy, widgy, well, it's a nogg..., wee-wee, water, uncle sam, tuppence, tummy ache, trotters, tootsies and 123 more...
-
January
shard, famine, lure, gentry, connive, conspicuous, stroller, dashboard, trichinosis, sash window, condescension, sophomore and 53 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for gutter.

reesetee Indeed--which makes me wonder why it isn't on my philately list.
There. All fixed. Sep 23, 2008
bilby Philately too. Sep 23, 2008
reesetee In book printing, the inner margin of a book's leaves (nearest the spine). Sometimes called a joint. Feb 20, 2007