tank town
Americannoun
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a town where trains stop to take on a supply of water.
-
any small, unimportant, or uninteresting town.
Etymology
Origin of tank town
An Americanism dating back to 1910–15
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.
Without air conditioning, explains a new Texan, Houston would have remained a torpid tank town, and never made it to the status of a big city.
From Time Magazine Archive
Its actors are unknowns, its scene a Southwestern tank town, and its subject boredom.
From Time Magazine Archive
She was not Mollie Ticklepitcher at all, as Mr. Lord had so kindly supposed, but an actress with a tank town stock company.
From Time Magazine Archive
Life in and around their pelagic tank town is the subject of this eerie, colorful documentary by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, a successor to his awesome epic, The Silent World.
From Time Magazine Archive
I had to wander around that tank town for hours, keeping a blanket-watch on the post office for either the income or the outgo of my precious hunk of mail.
From Highways in Hiding by Smith, George Oliver
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.
