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Dugout   Listen
noun
Dugout  n.  
1.
A canoe or boat dug out from a large log. (U.S.) "A man stepped from his slender dugout."
2.
A place dug out.
3.
A house made partly in a hillside or slighter elevation. (Western U.S.)
4.
(Baseball) A structure on the edge of the playing field in foul territory, partly below ground and partly above ground, open toward the playing field but roofed and with the other three sides closed. It is typically long and narrow, having benches where the players may sit when not on the playing field; as, the foul ball was tipped into the dugout.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Dugout" Quotes from Famous Books



... head was bound with a bloody bandage and who was still dazed and troubled when the correspondent talked with him. "It was a dark hole which held twenty men, all lying in a heap together, and that was the only dugout for my company, so there was not room for more than a few. It was necessary to take turns in this shelter while outside the English shells were coming and bursting everywhere. Two or three men were dragged out to make room for ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... mingled with Neil's breath as he forced his way through the bog. Twenty rods farther on they came to a slime covered bit of water on which was floating a dugout canoe. Immense relief replaced the anxiety in Nathaniel's face as he climbed into it. At that moment he was willing to fight a hundred men for Marion's sake, but snakes and bogs and bloodhounds were entirely outside his pale of argument and he exhibited no hesitation in betraying ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood

... who was the first to pick up the trail left by castaways from the wrecked vessels. On May 15, 1824, his ship, the St. Patrick, passed by Tikopia Island, one of the New Hebrides. There a native boatman pulled alongside in a dugout canoe and sold Dillon a silver sword hilt bearing the imprint of characters engraved with a cutting tool known as a burin. Furthermore, this native boatman claimed that during a stay in Vanikoro six years earlier, he had seen two Europeans belonging to ships ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... up to the station, guessing what we would see. The buildings lay waste and white in ashes. The front of the dugout was torn down, the wood of its doors and windows burned. The door of the larger dugout, where the horses had been stabled, was also torn away. Five dead horses lay near by, a part of the stage stock kept there. We kept our eyes as long ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough

... which floated on the waters of what is now Fore River was probably a little dugout, a crude boat made by an Indian, who burned out the center of a pine log which he had felled by girdling with fire. After he had burned out as much as he could, he scraped out the rest with a stone tool called a "celt." The whole operation probably took one Indian three ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery

... a mass of accusations filed against him with the bishop. His friends rallied to his support, sent in a strong endorsement, and he remained. The padre had been industrious while here. Behind his house is the little river, with a bath-house built over it; crossing in a dugout canoe we found his garden flourishing, filled with fresh vegetables. The family of pets had grown; Baldur, Freia, Votan, Doxil—the dogs—were here as at Chila, but he also had fantail and capuchin pigeons, hens and chicks, ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr

... inside the battalion commander's dugout. Tea is as essential every afternoon to the British as ice to the average American in summer. They do not think of getting on without it if they can possibly have it, and it is part of the rations. As well take cigarettes ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... month later, an' Bill is romancin' along on one of them Nevada mountain-meadow trails, when he happens upon a low, squatty dugout, the same bein' a camp rather than a house, an' belongs with a hay ranche. In the door is standin' a most ornery seemin' gent, with long, tangled ha'r an' beard, an' his clothes looks like he's shorely witnessed times. The hands of this ha'ry gent is in his pockets, an' he exhibits a mighty ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... she cried, meaning, in the slang of the day, "good-for-nothing." "You would take my house by storm! Do you think it is a Boche dugout you charge when you come ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson

... of a trench. Rapid digging. Counter-attack repulsed. At nine o'clock all is quiet, only the artillery still popping. This evening we are to be relieved. The 132d Regiment is much beloved by the English! In a dugout we found two labels. One of them had the following writing on it: "God strafe the 132d Regiment (not 'God strafe England' this time). Sergeant Scott (?) Remington, Sewster Wall (?)." On the other was, "I wish the Devil would take you, ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene

... the rubber. At this time the process had not become for me the familiar story that it was destined to be. Beneath the hut were several unfinished paddles and a canoe under construction. The latter are invariably of the "dugout" type. A shape is roughly cut from a tree-trunk and then a fire is built in the centre and kept burning in the selected places until the trunk is well hollowed out. It is then finished off by hand. Paddles are formed from the buttresses which radiate ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange

... saw him as he smote his great chest and strode to the boat, where Juan had disposed his outfit and was waiting to pole him across. Only the faithful Dona Maria had softly called a final "adioscito" to him when he left his house. A half hour later, when the dugout poked its blunt nose into the ooze of the opposite shore, he leaped out and hurriedly divested himself of his clothing. Then he lifted his chair with its supplies to his shoulders, and Juan strapped ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... fellow-men, doing kindnesses often not even suspected by their beneficiaries. He is the sort of person of whom the trained observer may think, when he hears an unexpected kindness-grenade exploding somewhere down the line, "I'll bet that came from the Caliph's dugout!" A Caliph's heart is not surrounded by barbed wire entanglements or a strip of No Man's Land. Also, and rightly, he is stern to malefactors and fakers of ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley

... Revolutionary War, a Swede named Jeremiah Dobbs, established a ferry here connecting with the northern end of the Palisades (visible on the left across the river). Originally only a dugout or skiff, it was the first ferry north of Manhattan, and was kept up by the Dobbs family for a century. In times past the residents have often tried to change the name of the town to something more "distinguished," but the old name could not ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous

... and hoist her up by man power again. It was when they left the solid bank and had to put out into the river that their troubles began. A pile-driver ought to have a pretty solid foundation. Ought to have! They took two dugout canoes, lashed them together, put a bamboo deck across, set their pile-driver on the deck and turned to again. It made a kind of a wabbly base; besides hauling the hammer out every time it jumped into the river, they had to see that it didn't come bouncing down atop of their own ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly

... Lookin' out from high up in a tree one of 'em seed two little pickaninnies but he couldn't find whar dey went. When he went back home and told 'bout it, evvybody went to huntin' 'em, s'posin' dey was lost chillun. Dey traced 'em to a dugout, and dere dey found dem two grown slaves what had done run away years ago, and dey had done had two little chillun born in dat dugout. Deir marster come and got 'em and tuk 'em home, but de chillun went plumb blind when dey tried to live out in de sunlight. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration

... minutes we were scrambling out again through the deep, muddy trench leading to the dugout, promising to come back to tea with the officers, in their billet, when our ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... early. The boatmen were jabbering and dodging and shouting. Already the dugout was loaded with its twenty, but the rope-ladder was as full as ever. Out from the ship's side shoved the big canoe, its captain shaking his head vigorously at the passengers above and yelling: "No! No!" while his men ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin

... (construction) 161; chamber &c. (receptacle) 191; xenodochium[obs3]. tenement, messuage, farm, farmhouse, grange, hacienda, toft[obs3]. cot, cabin, hut, chalet, croft, shed, booth, stall, hovel, bothy[obs3], shanty, dugout [U.S.], wigwam; pen &c. (inclosure) 232; barn, bawn[obs3]; kennel, sty, doghold[obs3], cote, coop, hutch, byre; cow house, cow shed; stable, dovecote, columbary[obs3], columbarium; shippen[obs3]; igloo, iglu[obs3], jacal[obs3]; lacustrine dwelling[obs3], lacuslake dwelling[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... tells one man that the Colonel's a drunkard, another that it's women, another that he gambles and doesn't pay, another that he pays the newspapers to put in all these things about him, while all the time in France he's in a blue funk hiding in his dugout." ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... idea of shuffling off six or seven feet of mortal coil when, a few rods away, I saw a blue smoke issuing from the side of the mountain and rising toward the sky. I went rapidly towards it and found it to be a plain dugout with a dirt floor. I entered and cast myself upon a rude nail keg, allowing my feet to remain suspended at the lower end of my legs, an attitude which I frequently affect ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... the creek and crept toward its mouth. Jack was rooting along like a bear when he almost bumped into the dugout canoe which had looked so very like a stranded log. It was tied to a tree by a line of twisted fibre and the rising tide had borne it well up into the marsh. Here it was invisible from the ship and only a miracle of good fortune had ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... showed the value of doing good. One might work a lifetime with some of them, and have little to show for it in the end; but it took a long time to build the pyramids and the Panama Canal, and to advance from the dugout of the savage to the Mauretania. It is work better worth doing than any ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... roared out a piercing "hurrah," which spread like wildfire and found an echo in unseen throats that repeated it enthusiastically. Deeply shaken, Marschner bowed his head and swiftly drew his hand across his eyes when the commandant of the trench rushed toward him from the dugout. ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko

... pleasure for him to meet you; it causes him to put himself into the most commonplace conversation, the simplest greeting, and make it, in his small way, a matter of art. It makes it a pleasure for him to call upon a friend beneath the shade of some live-oak or in a dugout or jacal, carrying some white sugar for his wife or some candy for his little ones. Our instinctive disposition to infer deplorable lacunae in the region of morals from the possession of a talent for manners ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various

... different workers in the same field of endeavor, and especially in that of invention; for every invention is but an improvement on something which has gone before. The sail-boat was an advance on the rude dugout propelled by paddles. The first clumsy steamboat seemed a marvel to those who had known no other propulsive power than that of the wind or the oar. The horse-drawn vehicle succeeded the litter and the palanquin, to be in turn followed by the locomotive; and so the telegraph, as ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse

... were left at the plantation. They took their guns and a day's provisions and carried a long, narrow-beamed canoe down to the shore. It was a dugout, quite unlike the graceful birch affairs that Jeremy had seen among the Penobscots, but serviceable and ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader

... was resourceful. He at once had his men build a pirogue, or dugout canoe. In this he rowed across the first branch of the river, and on the edge of the water-covered plain put up a scaffold. Then the men and the baggage were ferried across in the pirogue, and the baggage was placed on the scaffold. Last of all, the pack-horses swam ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy

... a silvery expanse shone ahead of him, he did not realize for the moment that his aimless wanderings had brought him to Snake River. He stumbled on till he reached the edge of the stream and saw in the black shadow of the trees a dugout half filled with water. For the first time in his night of wandering, a vague purpose took shape in his ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith

... record of self-sacrifice continued after his arrival in Arizona early in 1880, the first stop being at Concho. There, according to his son, Wilson G., the family for two years could have been rated as among "the poorest of poor pioneers," with a dugout for a home, this later succeeded by a log cabin of comparative luxury. For months the bread was of barley flour, the diet later having variety, changed to corn bread and molasses, with wheat flour bread as a ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock

... made will readily identify every natural landmark. But although I have not consciously introduced any changes in the landscape as God made it, I have in fairness to the settlers entirely redrawn the superimposed man-made landscape.] It was built of logs, but it looked more like a dugout, for stable as well as dwelling were covered by way of a roof with blower-thrown straw In the door of the hovel ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove

... two hundred miles from home we struck Prairie Creek, where we found abundant signs of beaver, mink, otter and other fur-bearing animals. No Indians had troubled us, and we felt safe in establishing headquarters here and beginning work. The first task was to build a dugout in a hillside, which we roofed with brush, long grass, and finally dirt, making everything snug and cozy. A little fireplace in the wall served as both furnace and kitchen. Outside we built a corral for the oxen, which ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)

... of steel that was sweeping the plain back of the trenches. They tenderly picked the child up and bore him safely to the trench, where he was placed in a first-aid station in a bomb-proof dugout. ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce

... little force. The Turk was not only a brave, but a "wily" fighter—snipers were always giving trouble, and one never knew from which direction the next shot was coming. Men with "nerves" declared that our line must be full of spies—sometimes a shot would come through the door of a dugout facing out to sea. These snipers were certainly brave fellows—some were found covered with leaves—one was found in a cleft in the rock where he must have been lowered by his comrades and he could not get ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett

... much," declared the other, scornfully. "I had a little dugout, which I paddled easy. I spected to stay 'roun' till the doctor he kim, which was to be at a sartin day; but yuh see they run me out. But I gotter a chanct to fix it all up. Madge, she's stoppin' at the cabin o' a man dad used ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne

... in flakes, and the vessel was entirely worthless. But Lewis wrote that "the boat in every other rispect completely answers my most sanguine expectations"! Then the men were employed for some time in making "dugout" canoes from cottonwood logs,—a weary labor, considering the tools they had. Not until July 15th was the long interruption ended, and the ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton

... forever beating back all efforts at saloon building within the corporation's limits, making Wykerton their sworn enemy for all time. In the new town, which was a ten-by-ten shack of vertical boards, a sod stable, and two dugout homes, the very first sale of lots, for cash, too, was made to Darley Champers & Co., dealers in real ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter

... water craft, launch, rowboat, canoe, gondola, punt, yacht, yawl, scull, cock, dugout, smack, pirogue, trawler, sloop, praam, coracle, pontoon, bateau, wherry, pinnace, scow, banca, transport, dory, galley, cruiser, ship, barge, bark, brig, bucentaur, skiff, caique, drogher, schooner, cockleshell, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... returned to Victoria. And with them came a mad rabble of gold-crazy prospectors. A city of tents sprang up overnight round Victoria. The smithy was besieged for picks, for shovels, for iron ladles. Men stood in long lines for their turn at the trading-store. By canoe, by dugout, by pack-horse, and on foot, they planned to ascend the Fraser, and they mobbed the company for passage to Langley by the first steamer out from Victoria. Goods were paid for in cash. Before Finlayson ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut

... squat building. It seems to have been crushed into the slope by the driving force of the vicious mountain storms to which it is open on three sides. There is no shelter for it. It stands out bravely to sunshine and storm alike with the contemptuous indifference of familiarity. It is a dugout, and, as its name implies, is built half in the ground. Its solitary door and single parchment-covered window overlook the valley, and the white path in front where the snow is packed hard by the tramp of dogs and men, and the runners of the dog-sled. Below the slope bears ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum

... people, I hate to think of them spending the winter in that cave of Krajiek's," said grandmother. "It's no better than a badger hole; no proper dugout at all. And I hear he's made them pay twenty dollars for his old cookstove ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather

... the neighbourhood of the town, I found such a poverty of insects and birds that I determined to go for a few days to the island of Semao at the western extremity of Timor, where I heard that there was forest country with birds not found at Coupang. With some difficulty I obtained a large dugout boat with outriggers, to take me over a distance of about twenty miles. I found the country pretty well wooded, but covered with shrubs and thorny bushes rather than forest trees, and everywhere excessively parched and dried up by the long-continued dry season. I stayed ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... the limit! The dugout swarms with them. Last night they ate half my biscuits and a good part of Timothy's clean socks, and whenever I began to get to sleep one of them would run across my face, or some other sensitive part of my anatomy, and wake ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey

... feet of the shore, he sprang out, leaving the dugout to drift. Not wishing to frighten the darkey into the loss of his boat, Paul pulled in and ran it up on the bank. He then noticed that she had a cargo of stone jugs filled with "Arkansaw lightning," held in with corn cob stoppers. ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton

... "slatting" of her mother. She had determined to win him, no matter what the father might say—for to her all men were of the same social level and she as good as the best. Indeed, she knew no other world than the plains of Colorado, for she was born in the little dugout which still remained a part of the kitchen. The conventions of cities did ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... resumed Sam. "You go in and git your land filed on, and put you up a sod house or dugout for the first season, because lumber's awful high out here. It's pretty late to do anything with a crop this year, even if you had any breakin' done, but you can take your team and gether bones this fall and winter, and that'll make you a good livin', too. You can git some young ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... had learned something of how Fritz fought the Canadians took to paying him back in some of his own coin. Not that they matched the deeds of the Huns—only a Hun could do that. But the Canadians were not eager to take prisoners. They would bomb a dugout rather than take its occupants back. And a dugout that has been bombed yields ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder

... preparing to pay our first visit ashore. Early in the morning I had noticed a tiny outrigger canoe, with an impossible spritsail, skimming the surface of the lagoon. The canoe itself was coffin- shaped, a mere dugout, fourteen feet long, a scant twelve inches wide, and maybe twenty-four inches deep. It had no lines, except in so far that it was sharp at both ends. Its sides were perpendicular. Shorn of the outrigger, it would have capsized of itself inside a tenth of a second. It was the outrigger ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... volley. That the swimmers escaped is little short of a miracle. But they remained untouched, and, gaining the opposite bank, they ran forward and tied the rope's end to a tree-stump. In the meantime two other soldiers started over the Rio Grande in a dugout, but this upset and let the men into the water, and they had to swim as had the others. But they landed with their guns intact, and at once opened fire at the nearest ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer

... directed. However, after giving them a fair trial, we decided that they must be replaced by Italians. The question of housing the eighteen Italians soon came up. Tents might be adopted or even the unsanitary "dugout" be allowed to mar the landscape. A shanty was entirely too ugly to suit our tastes, and also expensive, and useless when the men were through with it. Tents were too airy, as we knew the work would continue until freezing weather, and perhaps well into ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall



Words linked to "Dugout" :   bunker, ballpark, munition, fox hole, park, dugout canoe, funk hole, shelter, canoe, fortification, pirogue, foxhole



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