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The Collaborative International Dictionary
Dunghill

Dunghill \Dung"hill`\, n.

  1. A heap of dung.

  2. Any mean situation or condition; a vile abode.

    He . . . lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill. -- 1. Sam. ii. 8.

    Dunghill fowl, a domestic fowl of common breed.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
dunghill

early 14c., from dung + hill (n.).

Wiktionary
dunghill

n. A heap of dung, especially one for agricultural purposes; a muckheap, dungheap.

WordNet
dunghill
  1. n. a foul or degraded condition

  2. a heap of dung or refuse [syn: midden, muckheap, muckhill]

Usage examples of "dunghill".

He crowded them by the front door, told them they must get out of the farm fast, warned them to be ready to stop by the dunghill, turn there, and fight off any threat from the voltigeurs.

He went first, jumping down the steps, sprinting towards the track, stopping at the dunghill, turning and dropping to one knee, and the red-jacketed riflemen were spreading in the skirmish line either side of him as he aimed the rifle at the side of the house, looking for an officer, seeing none, but there was a voltigeur taking aim with his musket.

Scarcely had he uttered these words when the cow with her young ones rushed through the walls as if they had been made of paper, went round the dunghill, bellowed at each of her calves, and then drove them all before her, according to their age, towards the river, where they got into the water, reached the island, and vanished among the bushes.

Right along the outbuildings extended a large dunghill, from which manure liquid oozed, while amidst fowls and turkeys, five or six peacocks, a luxury in Chauchois farmyards, were foraging on the top of it.

Job upon his dunghill, or--too horrible to relate--are buried in the depths of the common sewers.

You are very like the peacock, I thought, who is wrapped in the pride of his beauteous feathers but is known to be a dunghill bird by reason of his foul feet.

Some of these hardly gotten monuments were taken in a manner out of the dunghill, since they were found by me in the corner of despoiled churches or monasteries where they were close to ruin from rotting away.

There are thousands of such gewgaws and toys which people have in their chambers, or which they keep upon their shelves, believing that they are precious things, when they are the mere passing follies of the passing time and of no more value than papers gathered up from some dunghill or raked by chance out of the kennel.

I have found or purchased all my instruments and substances, so that I have no need to rake some dunghill for a few dirty specimens.

Constant visits to the vilest dens, where crime sprouted from the dunghill of poverty, had made Madame Angelin brave.

All was grey and misty in the courtyard, like steam from a smoking dunghill, but in the eastern sky the sun was diffusing a clear, cheerful radiance, and making the straw roofs of the sheds around the courtyard sparkle with the night dew.

A curly-haired dog which had been spending the night on a dry dunghill now rose in lazy fashion and, wagging its tail, walked slowly across the courtyard.

His eyes wandered from the mass of green to the dunghill: on top of it he noticed the bolets, chanterelles, blewits and collops that he had picked a little while before.

The ass laid himself down outside on the dunghill, the dog behind the door, the cat on the hearth by the warm ashes, and the cock settled himself in the cockloft, and as they were all tired with their long journey they soon fell fast asleep.

One of those perverse estheticians, undoubtedly, who could find beauty in a dunghill.