bottomless pit

bottomless pit

English

Etymology

From Revelation 9:1–12.[1]

Noun

bottomless pit (plural bottomless pits)

1. A pit with no visible bottom (apparently-infinite depth).

   Synonym: abyss

2. (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.

3. (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."

4. (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

Arabic: هَاوِيَة‎ f (hāwiya) Chinese: Mandarin: 無底洞 (zh) (wúdǐdòng) Finnish: pohjaton kuilu Old English: grundlēas pytt m Swedish: bottenlöst hål n

hell

Arabic: هَاوِيَة‎ f (hāwiya) Finnish: syvyys (fi) French: abîme (fr) m Swedish: avgrund (sv) c Thai: ช่องบาดาล (chɔ̂ng-baa-daan)

endless resource or supply

Finnish: ehtymätön lähde, pohjaton kaivo French: abîme (fr) m

person with boundless appetite; entity or problem which consumes endless resources

Finnish: pohjaton kaivo French: puits sans fond (fr) m German: Fass ohne Boden (de) n Hungarian: feneketlen zsák Indonesian: anjing menggonggong tulang Serbo-Croatian: vreća bez dna Spanish: pozo sin fondo, tragaldabas (es)

References

1. The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], 1611, OCLC 964384981, 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.”.

Further reading

• bottomless pit on Wikipedia.Wikipedia