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What is "pothole"

Crossword clues for pothole

pothole
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
pothole
noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ He rode his bike over an enormous pothole.
▪ It is going to cost the city at least $500,000 to patch potholes created by winter rains.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ In one of these potholes, Estrelita's front right hoof became trapped.
▪ It pitches and bobbles on some roads, and bounces over the potholes driven fast.
▪ The potholes go half way up the tire.
▪ The 1996 survey was taken during the fall, when there tend to be more potholes.
▪ The pass gets its name from two groups of deep limestone potholes set either side of the road.
▪ The road is rutted mud, with potholes like emptied boils.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Pothole

Pothole \Pot"hole`\, n. A circular hole formed in the rocky beds of rivers by the grinding action of stones or gravel whirled round by the water in what was at first a natural depression of the rock.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
pothole

also pot-hole, 1826, originally a geological feature in glaciers and gravel beds, from Middle English pot "a deep hole for a mine, or from peat-digging" (late 14c.), now generally obsolete, but preserved in Scotland and northern England dialect; perhaps ultimately related to pot (n.1) on notion of "deep, cylindrical shape." Applied to a hole in a road from 1909.

Wiktionary
pothole

Etymology 1 n. 1 A shallow pit or other edged depression in a road's surface, especially when caused by erosion by weather or traffic. 2 A pit formed in the bed of a turbulent stream. 3 (context geology English) A vertical cave system, often found in limestone. Etymology 2

n. (context archaeology English) A pit resulting from unauthorized excavation by treasure hunters or vandals.

WordNet
pothole

n. a pit or hole produced by wear or weathering (especially in a road surface) [syn: chuckhole]

Wikipedia
Pothole

A pothole is a structural failure in an asphalt pavement, caused by the presence of water in the underlying soil structure and the presence of traffic passing over the affected area. Introduction of water to the underlying soil structure first weakens the supporting soil. Traffic then fatigues and breaks the poorly supported asphalt surface in the affected area. Continued traffic action ejects both asphalt and the underlying soil material to create a hole in the pavement.

Pothole (geology)

Potholes are frequently encountered during mining operations in the Bushveld Igneous Complex in South Africa. Two orebodies, the Upper Group 2 (UG2) and the Merensky Reef, host about 70% of the world's platinum group metals (PGM), and pose major extraction problems for the mining industry in their faults, dykes, joints, domes, iron-rich ultramafic pegmatoids, rolls and dunite pipes. The greatest mining problems, though, are presented by potholes.

Massive outpourings of molten magma, predating the nearby Vredefort impact by at least 30 million years, led to partial to complete melting of the cumulus floor already in place. Flow and turbulence, high temperatures and chemical reactions, sculpted and potholed the surface of the floor in a process similar to the erosion caused by running water. With the end of the outpouring, when emplacement ceased, cooling of the magma started, leaving the potholes filled, and creating a fault surface at the interface of the pothole and the filling magma. The final phase was when crystallisation of chromitite was followed by that of pyroxene and plagioclase, while the contents of the potholes, also consisting of UG2 or Merensky Reef, but having followed a different cooling profile, showed little or no crystallisation of chromitite.

The problems posed by potholes to mining operations are rooted in the fracturing and fragmentation of the material in potholes and their surroundings. These lead to ground instabilities, especially in the hanging wall, and serious safety hazards. Mining is generally abandoned when more than about 40% of the raise line is potholed. A crew for developing new raise lines is usually on standby for such cases, incurring considerable development and labour costs.

In horizontal section potholes are roughly circular to elliptical and vary in diameter from 20 m to more than 1 km. In vertical section their shape is generally dish-like and may be quite asymmetric.

Pothole (landform)

Potholes, also known as caldrons, cisterns, ephemeral pools, tanks, tinajas, waterpockets, and weathering pits, are holes that were eroded away in bedrock. They are most commonly found in desert environments such as the Colorado Plateau. A few well known potholes are found in Canyonlands National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, and Moab. The Prairie Pothole Region is an area of the northern Great Plains that contains thousands of shallow wetlands known as potholes.

Pothole (disambiguation)

A pothole is a surface disruption in a roadway, caused by fatigue and erosion.

Pothole may also refer to:

  • Pothole, tinaja, or giant's kettle, a formation caused by the erosion of a riverbed
  • Pothole, or pit cave, a predominantly vertical cave system
  • Pothole (geology), a phenomenon encountered in the platinum mining industry in South Africa
  • Pothole, the upper section of Bull Shoals Lake, Missouri
  • A prairie pothole, a type of seasonal wetland characteristic of the Prairie Pothole Region of North America
  • A small deep hole dug to look for buried public utilities: see vacuum excavation
  • A type of hyperlink where the anchor is a word in a series of text, used by bloggers to save space and keep from cluttering up their posts with many URLs: see Internet Slang
  • A nineteenth century informal term for anus (see http://www.robinwolfe.com/victorian-porn-friday-10/)

Usage examples of "pothole".

The main streets were abuzz with electrotaxis, headlights ajar from the potholes.

Harlem as Cindee Maloo stomped her size-five Timberland all-terrain boot on the potholed street.

Where we crossed into the state, the highway was potholed and the vast ranchlands on either side had gone feral and dry in the wake of the retreating Oglalla Aquifer.

He went down, wearing his skiis, to the stream, and moved along the ice to one of the potholes where the water was boiling and green as it poured past.

They came out onto the porch, hugging sweatered arms against the cold as the delegation trudged closer across the cracking, potholed ice.

Oboyan road, the grand prize for the German assault, potholed and shredded but busy anyway with tanks and trucks moving up.

Main Street itself began to alter, wider than we recalled, windier and more riddled with potholes and litter.

When wilson had innocently inquired if this was because the revolutionary government had no money left to pay for the filling in of the enormous potholes in the roads, the agent had become even more nervous and said indignantly that it was entirely the fault of the inferior metal those perfidious Americanos used in the construction of their vehicles.

Just as baryons had slithered into dark matter potholes, so-on a much smaller scale - photinos collected in the pinpoint gravity wells of the new stars.

LEE had arranged to hide them proved to be a ramshackle two-story house on a potholed street of ramshackle two-story houses near the port that gave Puerto Princesa its name.

There was a mound of trash at the dead end of the badly potholed street, and one rusting car nosed into the embankment like some burrowing animal.

Grubby tenements overlooked the potholed road and the cracked sidewalks.

He drove past the unsmiling guards and down the dusty potholed road until he saw small boys waving him toward the parking lot.

It was an old two-lane county road, potholed and worn, no vehicle-control devices visible at all in it, the sort of road they had had a hundred fifty years ago.

As the chopper was in that tilted-forward attitude they assume as they ride the air cushion, Budd went running after it across the potholed empty lot.