dunghill
Americannoun
-
a heap of dung
-
a foul place, condition, or person
Etymology
Origin of dunghill
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
He once described himself to one of his children as “a machine condemned to devour books and then throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history.”
From The New Yorker
Hamlet says such slightly off-kilter lines as “To be or not to be, I there’s the point” and “What a dunghill idiot slave am I!”
From Washington Post
In a 2010 interview, Modiano referred to himself as “a product of the dunghill of the Occupation, that bizarre time when people who should have never met did meet and by chance produced a child.”
From Los Angeles Times
Jefferson said the work was like extracting diamonds from a dunghill.
From Salon
With the same view, any sort of garbage or offal may be thrown out, if the dunghill is so situated—as it always should be—that its exhalations will not prove an annoyance.
From Project Gutenberg
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
