ditch
/dɪtʃ
/- And there was no drainage ditch on the side.
- In one town, invading militiamen had filled an irrigation ditch with concrete.
- The trails cross irrigation ditches, and one eventually winds through rainforest to more open fields.
Synonyms
Synonyms
- I remember all the crafts they used to do: hedging, ditching - that's all gone now.
- His father worked for the nearby farms, doing ditching and draining, while his mother was an auxiliary nurse.
- The other remedy, of course, is to ditch all home PCs - go on, just throw them out in the street and get rid of them.
- However, to gain credibility with supporters he is ditching - or at least modifying - some of his pro-European views.
- But it bothers my head that my heart is so casual about ditching long and deeply held principles.
Synonyms
- She had been married for 25 years when her husband ditched her.
- Shanti's daughter, Raji, had a philandering husband who ditched her and took up with Kala.
- She ditched her husband in the Sin City, as part of a life-changing de-cluttering exercise in the early nineties.
Synonyms
- Some claimed to have ditched their high school or middle school to be on Berkeley's campus to show their opposition to the war.
- On top of everything else, she was now ditching school.
- At 15, Ed ditched school to go to L.A. and see the Red Hot Chili Peppers with Jason Lee, Ann, and Deanna.
- Yes, you can bail out of the aircraft or you can ditch the aircraft in the ocean or you can land.
- Deterioration of the hydraulic system could have resulted in us ditching the aircraft, just not so soon.
- The pilot ditched his aircraft in the lagoon surrounding the islands.
- All the time there were aircraft ditching in the sea.
- Geelong and Cessnock were also among the first units on scene when an RMAF Hawk aircraft ditched in the early phases of the exercise.
- Unknown to our crew, the skipper had told the squadron our aircraft had ditched, and survivor status was unknown.
- In Halifax I ditched the train in the first little yard (was it called Rockington... something like that), by the Bedford Basin, and went for coffee.
Derivatives
ditcher
/ noun ...- You're no ditcher - you're a girl who ditched one time and feels terrible about it and won't make that mistake again.
- Jim is a two-time ditcher who flew 79 operations during the war as an air gunner - always on low-level flights.
- Because it was during school hours, the path to her house was generally empty; the ditchers usually hung out in alleys or ruins.
Origin
Old English dīc, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch dijk 'ditch, dyke' and German Teich 'pond, pool', also to dyke2.
dyke from Middle English:
There are two almost contradictory aspects to dyke: it means both ‘something dug out’ and ‘something built up’. The first group of senses began in the medieval period and derives from the old Scandinavian word dík or diki, which corresponds to native English ditch (Old English) and is related to dig (Middle English). At much the same time related German and Dutch forms gave us the second group, initially in the sense ‘a city wall, a fortification’. A possible linking idea appears in the sense ‘dam’—a dam entails both the building up of an obstruction and the creation of a pool. The Dutch build dykes to prevent flooding from the sea. This is the context of the phrase to put your finger in a dyke, ‘to attempt to stem the advance of something undesirable’. It comes from a popular story of a heroic little Dutch boy who saved his community from flooding, by placing his finger in a hole in a dyke, thereby preventing it getting bigger and averting the disastrous consequences.
The word dyke is also a derogatory term for a lesbian, especially a masculine-looking one. Originally found in the fuller form bulldyke, it has been in use since at least the 1920s, but no one is sure of its origin.