Crossword clues for cesspool
cesspool
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Cesspool \Cess"pool`\ (-p[=oo]l`), n. [See Sesspol.] A cistern in the course, or the termination, of a drain, to collect sedimentary or superfluous matter; a privy vault; any receptacle of filth. [Written also sesspool.]
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
also cess-pool, 1670s, the first element perhaps an alteration of cistern, perhaps a shortened form of recess [Klein]; or the whole may be an alteration of suspiral (c.1400), "drainpipe," from Old French sospiral "a vent, air hole," from sospirer "breathe," from Latin suspirare "breathe deep" [Barnhart]. Meaning extended to "tank at the end of the pipe," which would account for a possible folk-etymology change in final syllable.\n
\nOther possible etymologies: Italian cesso "privy," from Latin secessus "place of retirement" (in Late Latin "privy, drain"); dialectal suspool, from suss, soss "puddle;" or cess "a bog on the banks of a tidal river."
Wiktionary
n. 1 An underground pit where sewage is held. 2 (context by extension English) A filthy place.
WordNet
Usage examples of "cesspool".
Documents keep bubbling up from the cesspool of the Florida state offices.
Old Mage, the alternative bids fair to be finding the cesspool before finding this gate, by the simple means of falling into it!
Heading toward the dark, waiting cesspool where he knew Elminster of Shadowdale and the wench Sharantyr would come .
Sharantyr asked, but Elminster towed her forward with surprising strength, and the words that began above the cesspool of the High Castle ended in a cold, shadowed hall lit by glowing mosses.
By its light, he saw that the cesspool and its surroundings were empty of all people.
In the center of the cracked, uneven stone floor was the cesspool, its surface still.
Belkram stood up on the palm of the hand as it came, tottering about uncertainly like a man on stilts hopping about in a cesspool and likely at any moment to come to a far closer acquaintance with it.
Bernard Barker shifts nervously as in right-angular time a future president metamorphoses the plumbers into the cesspool cleaners: but now, inside the Watergate, the Illuminati bug is unnoticed by those planting the CREEP bug, although both were subsequently found by the technicians installing the BUGGER bug.
In the center of a room only 18 feet by 20, was an open can, the reeking cesspool of this dungeon in which sat a sick Negro convict confined in this dark sweat-box, perishing.
Erne, looking so wonderfully handsome and so exquisitely clean, that going to Augusta Court to superintend the emptying of a cesspool became absolutely impossible.
Unlike most of us, you could leave this spiritual cesspool anytime you wanted.
Graves mentions a captain of the yeomanry corps who while investigating the report that 500 pikes were concealed at the bottom of a cesspool in one of the city markets superintended the emptying of the cesspool, at the bottom of which the arms were found.
Tooth had called for small rats, house and country, which was a fair enough call as some sewer, cesspool and dockside rats were almost as large as the little terrier himself.
Ikey was as natural a part of the chaffering, quarrelling humanity who lived in the rookeries among the slaughterhouses, cesspools and tanneries as anyone ever born in the square mile known to be the heartbeat of London Town.
The war council continued by the light of five hundred lamps, whose wicks floated in perfumed oils to drive away the clouds of mosquitoes that, as soon as the sun touched the horizon, swarmed from the swamps and cesspools outside the city walls.