MIDDEN • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Midden

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noun

Midden n. (Also midding)

A dunghill. (Prov. Eng.)

An accumulation of refuse about a dwelling place; especially, an accumulation of shells or of cinders, bones, and other refuse on the supposed site of the dwelling places of prehistoric tribes, as on the shores of the Baltic Sea and in many other places. See Kitchen middens.

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Etymology of 'Midden'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Midden" Quotes from Famous Books

... believe that for civilised people of the nineteenth century it is as well to say as little as possible about ancestors who possessed our vices without our amenities, our ignorance without our science; who were bred, no matter how, like flies by summer heat, out of that everlasting midden which men call the world, to buzz and sting their foolish day, and leave behind them a fresh race which knows them not, and could win no honour by owning them, and which owes them no more than if it had been produced, as midden-flies were said ...

— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley

... shock, it was our habit to rummage in the general midden outside our stockings. If there was a drum upon the heap, should not first a tune be played—softly lest it rouse the house? Or if a velocipede stood beside the fender, surely the restless creature chafed for exercise and must be ridden a few times around the room. ...

— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... with a growing sense, which I have had ever since return here, of the squalor, the lousiness, the dust-heap, the unblushing immondezzaio quality of Rome and its inhabitants. Everything ragged, filthy, listless; the very cauliflowers they were selling looking all stalk, fit for that refuse midden which symbolises the city. By the Temple of Vesta a lot of carts were drawn up, with galled horses and ragged crouching peasants—that sort ...

— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee

Words linked to "Midden" : eitchen midden, trash dump, waste-yard, dunghill, pile, agglomerate, archeology, kitchen midden, cumulus, dump, muckhill, rubbish dump, dumpsite, garbage dump, wasteyard, mound, heap, muckheap