bottomless pit
English
Etymology
From Revelation 9:1–12.[1]
Noun
bottomless pit (plural bottomless pits)
- A pit with no visible (infinite) bottom.
- Synonym: abyss
- (biblical) Hell.
- 1769, The Bible, King James Version, Oxford Standard Text, Revelation, 9:11,
- And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.
- 1769, The Bible, King James Version, Oxford Standard Text, Revelation, 9:11,
- (figuratively) An endless resource or supply.
- 1994: Asia in the Making of Europe, Donald Frederick Lach
- Lipsius was replaced at Leyden by Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609), the French Protestant scholar who was known to contemporaries as "the bottomless pit of erudition."
- 1994: Asia in the Making of Europe, Donald Frederick Lach
- (figuratively) A person with an apparently boundless appetite; an entity or problem which consumes seemingly endless resources.
- Synonyms: money pit, black hole
- 2006: The Club For Growth: Bottomless Pit (blog entry), Phillip Rodokanakis
- In other words, we will continue throwing good money after bad, trying to feed a bottomless pit's insatiable appetite for taxpayer dollars.
Translations
A pit with no visible (infinite) bottom
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hell
endless resource or supply
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person with boundless appetite; entity or problem which consumes endless resources
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Further reading
bottomless pit on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
References
- ^ The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], 1611, →OCLC, Revelation 9:1: “And the fift Angel sounded, and I saw a starre fall from heauen vnto the earth: and to him was giuen the key of the bottomlesse pitte.”