midden
/ˈmɪd(ə)n
/noun
1A dunghill or refuse heap.David McOmish started talking about East Chisenbury on Salisbury Plain, which is a midden of refuse so large and strange it re-defines the concept of ‘rubbish’ and its ‘disposal’....
- One video showed Bushell looking disparagingly at another house and saying how filthy it was and how much of a midden it was, a phrase he used repeatedly.
- They showed her the midden, an open heap of manure and dirt, the same one she had seen the women dump the buckets on the day before, then they told her now was the time to use it if she had to.
1.1 short for kitchen midden.Excavations of shell middens and temporary camps on the shore indicated mainly a hunter-gatherer subsistence....
- Associated sites include the dense cluster of prehistoric shell middens in the constricted Mississippi River floodplain.
- At Mildenhall Fen, ten miles to the south-west, two similar middens were excavated, again without any evidence for buildings.
Origin
Late Middle English myddyng, of Scandinavian origin; compare with Danish mødding 'muck heap'.