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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
trough
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
peaks and troughs (=high points and low points)
▪ Sales went through a number of peaks and troughs in the last fiscal year.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
water
▪ Horse to horse contact directly or via feed, water troughs, pasture or stable fittings pass the infection to susceptible horses.
▪ Scattered here and there are bathtubs, taking on new lives as water troughs.
▪ Playing with the classroom water trough, some children feel the need to fill, pour and empty continuously.
▪ The water trough was empty except for a layer of scum, a beer bottle and some sweet wrappers.
▪ There it lived happily ever after, plodding dreamily through piles of dandelions and cabbage - carefully avoiding the water trough.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ the peaks and troughs of economic cycles
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ About half a mile upstream the trough was traversed by the Purton breakwater.
▪ In a wave trough I caught a glimpse of a coral head to port: a little too close for comfort.
▪ Scattered here and there are bathtubs, taking on new lives as water troughs.
▪ The allocation of labour to activities can be plotted as a histogram which will invariably show peaks and troughs.
▪ The field was a marsh, the track a trough.
▪ Then suddenly he thrust his head between his owner's legs and hoisted him into the trough with a resounding splash!
▪ There was a lot of gravel to walk across with troughs and wheelbarrows with snowdrops and crocuses in.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Trough

Trough \Trough\ (tr[o^]f), n. [OE. trough, trogh, AS. trog, troh; akin to D., G., & Icel. trog, Sw. tr[*a]g, Dan. trug; probably originally meaning, made of wood, and akin to E. tree. [root]63 & 24

  1. See Tree, and cf. Trug.] 1. A long, hollow vessel, generally for holding water or other liquid, especially one formed by excavating a log longitudinally on one side; a long tray; also, a wooden channel for conveying water, as to a mill wheel.

  2. Any channel, receptacle, or depression, of a long and narrow shape; as, trough between two ridges, etc.

  3. (Meteor.) The transverse section of a cyclonic area where the barometric pressure, neither rising nor falling, has reached its lowest point.

    Trough gutter (Arch.), a rectangular or V-shaped gutter, usually hung below the eaves of a house.

    Trough of the sea, the depression between two waves.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
trough

Old English trog "wooden vessel, tray, hollow vessel, canoe," from Proto-Germanic *trugaz (cognates: Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old Norse trog, Middle Dutch troch, Dutch trog, Old High German troc, German trog), from PIE *dru-ko-, from root *dru-, *deru- "wood, tree" (see tree (n.)). Originally pronounced in English with a hard -gh- (as in Scottish loch); pronunciation shifted to "-ff," but spelling remained.

Wiktionary
trough

n. 1 A long, narrow container, open on top, for feeding or watering animals. 2 Any similarly shaped container. 3 # (context Australia New Zealand English) A rectangular container used for washing or rinsing clothing. 4 A short, narrow canal designed to hold water until it drains or evaporates. 5 (context Canada English) A gutter under the eaves of a building; an eaves trough. 6 (context agriculture Australia New Zealand English) A channel for conveying water or other farm liquids (such as milk) from place to place by gravity; any ‘U’ or ‘V’ cross-sectioned irrigation channel. 7 A long, narrow depression between waves or ridges; the low portion of a wave cycle. vb. To eat in a vulgar style, as if eating from a trough

WordNet
trough
  1. n. a narrow depression (as in the earth or between ocean waves or in the ocean bed)

  2. a channel along the eaves or on the roof; collects and carries away rainwater [syn: gutter]

  3. a concave shape with an open top [syn: bowl]

  4. a treasury for government funds [syn: public treasury, till]

  5. a long narrow shallow receptacle

  6. a container (usually in a barn or stable) from which cattle or horses feed [syn: manger]

Gazetteer
Wikipedia
Trough

Trough may refer to:

Trough (geology)

In geology, a trough is a linear structural depression that extends laterally over a distance, while being less steep than a trench.

A trough can be a narrow basin or a geologic rift, often formed at the rim of a tectonic plate.

There are various oceanic troughs, troughs found under oceans; examples include

  • the Cayman Trough
  • the Nankai Trough
  • the Rockall Trough and others along the rift of the mid-oceanic ridge,
  • the Timor Trough.
Trough (economics)

In economics, a trough is a low turning point or a local minimum of a business cycle. The time evolution of many variables of economics exhibit a wave like behavior with local maxima (peaks) followed by local minima (troughs). A business cycle may be defined as the period between two consecutive peaks.

The period of the business cycle in which real GDP is increasing is called the expansion. In which the real GDP moves from the trough towards the peak.

Trough (barony)

Trough is a barony in County Monaghan, Republic of Ireland.

Trough (meteorology)

A trough is an elongated region of relatively low atmospheric pressure, often associated with fronts.

Unlike fronts, there is not a universal symbol for a trough on a weather chart. The weather charts in some countries or regions mark troughs by a line. In the United States, a trough may be marked as a dashed line. In the UK, Hong Kong and Fiji, it is represented by a bold line extended from a low pressure center or between two low pressure centers; in Macau and Australia, it is a dotted line. If they are not marked, troughs may still be identified as an extension of isobars away from a low pressure center.

Sometimes the region between two high pressure centers may assume the character of a trough when there is a detectable wind shift noted at the surface. In the absence of a wind shift, the region is designated a col, akin to a geographic saddle between two mountain peaks.

If a trough forms in the mid-latitudes, a temperature difference between two sides of the trough usually exists in the form of a weather front. A weather front is usually less convective than a trough in the tropics or subtropics (such as a tropical wave). Sometimes collapsed frontal systems will degenerate into troughs.

Convective cells may develop in the vicinity of troughs and give birth to a tropical cyclone. Some tropical or subtropical regions such as the Philippines or south China are greatly affected by convection cells along a trough. In the mid-latitude westerlies, troughs and ridges often alternate, especially when upper-level winds are in a high-amplitude pattern. For a trough in the westerlies, the region just west of the trough axis is typically an area of convergent winds and descending air - and hence high pressure - while the region just east of the trough axis is an area of fast, divergent winds and low pressure. Tropical waves are a type of trough in easterly currents, a cyclonic northward deflection of the trade winds.

Troughs may be at the surface, or aloft, or both under various conditions. Most troughs bring clouds, showers, and a wind shift, particularly following the passage of the trough. This results from convergence or "squeezing" which forces lifting of moist air behind the trough line.

Usage examples of "trough".

After passing through the benzoline trough the wool passes through a similar trough filled with water.

I followed it out to the kitchen, and, as it touched the blue lights over the trough, beginning the process that would extrude my meat, would fill my mug with milk, it seemed to move as though exhausted.

The trough that was midlife was full of waves that could lift a man up and then drop him down just as deep.

Zodiac rocking in the troughs between waves, they lowered a Neuston net over the side.

Even as she watched, the trough overfilled with water and began to flood the bank.

The Principessa had rolled into a trough caused by the inshore swell, and the ball from the second carronade went into the hull below the windows at a downward angle.

In those chambers, Licky had told him, the vapor of the quicksilver was trapped and condensed, reheated and recondensed, till in the topmost vault the pure metal ran down into a stone trough or bowl-only a drop or two a day, he said, from the low-grade ores they were roasting now.

Troughs of briny water filled the lowest spots on the floor, but they had hours to explore before the tide resurged through this opening to fill it dangerously.

Waves spouted higher than the mast had been, but the hull swam up from the trough of its arrival.

Administration and the CPC, working our way along molded troughs of plastic covered with the greenish-silver substrate left by the barnacles, past an electric array, beneath a tree of radiator panels thirty times as tall as a man, and entered the emergency lock at its nether end.

Than lead the wretched revelry Where fools at swinish troughs carouse.

The cries, the howlings of the women, who ran trough the streets throwing, according to the custom of the country, dust in the, air, excited the male inhabitants to a desperate resistance, which rendered unavailing, this short occupation of the town, by a handful of men, who, finding themselves left without assistance, retreated towards the breach.

In areas of the apex of the wave, disturbance was powerful enough that there was no need for waves to interfere with each other to distort the real world, the wave itself was what did the initial damage, and created what we call the Pelagir Hills and what you call the Uncleansed Landsand yet, entire nations who happened to be in the trough of the wave remained relatively unscathed.

Out of a trough up in the Alleghany Mountains--one of those troughs occupied by the sinewy Scotch-Irish pioneers who first, after the French, as you will recall, crept down into the great valley--there journeyed one day, a century after Celoron, a young man on horseback.

It was a world of ceralean blues, deep-velvet purples, inked greens, of wide brainstone coral cliffs and deep-bottomed troughs where the sea turned black in the chartless depths--a world of eel and octopus and squid, of the soldier crab and the loggerhead turtle, of jeweled angelfish, gliding manta rays, and great blue marlin.