Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Cesspool   Listen
noun
Cesspool  n.  (Written also sesspool)  A cistern in the course, or the termination, of a drain, to collect sedimentary or superfluous matter; a privy vault; any receptacle of filth.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Cesspool" Quotes from Famous Books



... outdoor life and freedom from conventional cares—there has been a peculiar charm in ranch life. In no life are the grit and efficiency of the well-bred in such marked contrast with the puling whine and shiftlessness of the settler from the cesspool of the city slums. I have gone into a prairie shanty where an Englishwoman sat in filth and rags and idleness, cursing the country to which she had come and bewailing in cockney English that she had come to this; and I have gone on to an English ranch where there presided some young Englishman's ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... canal was commenced which was designed to create a flowage calculated to keep the harbor clear of the constantly accumulating filth, but it was never finished, and there remains an evidence of Spanish inefficiency, while the harbor continues to be a vast cesspool. It would be supposed that in a fever-haunted region, great attention would be bestowed upon the matter of drainage, but this is not the case in Havana, or other cities of the island. Most of the effort made in this ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... material of which the soil is composed, as it is evident that in a gravelly or sandy soil it must be greater than when the ground consists of loam or clay. The estimates vary from 3 to 30 per cent., but the latter is probably too high. If, therefore, a cesspool leak into the ground, the offensive effluvia, if in large quantities, will escape into the soil, and are given off at the surface of the ground, or are drawn into a house by the fire; but, if small, they are rendered innocuous ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various

... indispensable conveniences of a civilized dwelling. This forces them in storm time to such extremities, that no wonder fevers and plagues are the result. We had not been at sea one week, when to hold your head down the fore hatchway was like holding it down a suddenly opened cesspool. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... curious story, HISTOIRE FORT CRIEUSE,—about one of Prince Fred's amourettes." Story which this Editor, in the name of the whole human species, will totally suppress, and sweep into the cesspool, to herald Reichenbach thither. Except only that this corollary by the Duchess of Kendal may be ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle

... to remind you that the lower end of the main drain must be protected from the iniquity of the sewer or cesspool to which it runs by another trap, or dam, just below the open pipe that admits fresh air from outside the house (Fig. 5), and also, as I have before remarked, that the system is wrong. The rising tide of civilization will some time wash it ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner

... peace, Lichonin. As I see it, gentlemen, this is downright and plain swinishness—that which you are about to do. We have passed the time so wonderfully, amiably and simply, it seems,—but no, you needs must, like drunken cattle, clamber into a cesspool. I won't go." ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... suicided, "that the corpse be tied to a cart, dragged on a hurdle, head down, face to ground, {191} through the streets of the town, to be hung up by the feet, an object of derision, then cast into the river in default of a cesspool." Criminals who evade punishment by flight are to be hanged in effigy. Montreal citizens are ordered to have their chimneys cleaned every month and their houses provided with ladders. Also "the inhabitants of Montreal must not allow their pigs to run in the street," ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... full of filth ran right under the floor. A cesspool was close to a fourth cottage. In several the floors were clean; but all sorts of filth had dropped through and stayed there, and when it rained the water ran under the floor. "Just lift up a plank," said Farmer Grey; it was done, and he stuck his stick into a foot or more ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston

... table!" cries her father angrily. "Throw the kittens in the cesspool! I won't have the nasty things in the ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... faeces, feces, , excrement, ordure, dung, crap[vulgar], shit[vulgar]; sewage, sewerage; muck; coprolite; guano, manure, compost. dunghill, colluvies[obs3], mixen[obs3], midden, bog, laystall[obs3], sink, privy, jakes; toilet, john, head; cess[obs3], cesspool; sump, sough, cloaca, latrines, drain, sewer, common sewer; Cloacina; dust hole. sty, pigsty, lair, den, Augean stable[obs3], sink of corruption; slum, rookery. V. be unclean, become unclean &c. Adj.; rot, putrefy, ferment, fester, rankle, reek; stink &c. 401; mold, molder; go ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... fearful. At the gate of la Cassine, too, people were trampled to death in their eagerness to gain admittance. From all the adjacent heights the terror-stricken fragments of the army came tumbling into the city, as into a cesspool, with the hollow roar of pent-up water that has burst its dam. The fatal attraction of those walls had ended by making cowards of the bravest; men trod one another down in their blind haste ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... field of wheat, sowed on the 21st December, and which did not come up until the frost broke, in March (the previous crop having been Swedes), the blade was so yellow and the plant altogether so small and sickly in appearance, that I had it manured with a water-cart from a cesspool in April. This appeared to produce a wonderful improvement immediately, as the plant assumed a deep green and grew very fast, but when it ought to have shot, the heads seemed to stick in the sockets, the blade and straw became mildewed and made no progress ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett

... coffers of these human dealers—as the rental for profit of the bodies of our American girl and her alien sister who has been mercilessly trapped, lured from her home and sold into the great festering cesspool, without the slightest knowledge of our customs ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann

... that one) soon distanced all the rest and presently became the edifice before which the manager from Stratford was only the facade. He—this 'someone'—was a noble and a man of wide reach both in his natural endowments and in his acquired culture. But he couldn't dip openly into the London cesspool; he had his own quality to safeguard against the contamination of a new and none too highly-regarded trade. 'I don't care for your shillings,' he said to Shaxper, 'nor for the printed plays afterward; but I do ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller

... properly screened to exclude flies and insects, and is to be used for the purpose of cooling, mixing, canning and keeping the milk. The milk room shall not be used for any other purpose than milk handling and storing, and must be 100 feet or more distant from hogpen, horse stable, cesspool or similar accumulation of filth, and must be over 50 feet from cow stalls or places where milking is done. In regard to the size of the milk room and equipment, nothing is said provided it is large enough for the milk to be handled conveniently. ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson



Words linked to "Cesspool" :   sink, sump



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com