dregs
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]See dreg.
Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]dregs pl (normally plural, singular dreg)
- The sediment settled at the bottom of a liquid; the lees in a container of unfiltered wine.
- 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Psalms 75:8:
- For in the hand of the Lord there is a cup, and the wine is red: it is full of mixture, and he powreth out of the same: but the dregges thereof all the wicked of the earth shall wring them out, and drinke them.
- 1667, John Milton, “Book VII”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC:
- And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth / Throughout the fluid mass; but downward purged / The black tartareous cold infernal dregs
- 1826, [Mary Shelley], chapter IX, in The Last Man. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC:
- Yet even now I had not drunk the bitter potion to the dregs; I was not yet persuaded of my loss; I did not yet feel in every pulsation, in every nerve, in every thought, that I remained alone of my race - that I was The Last Man.
- c. 1897, Ernest Dowson, Dregs:
- The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof, / This is the end of every song man sings! / The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain, / Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain
- (figuratively, the dregs) The worst and lowest part of something.
- the dregs of society
- I sat through the dregs of a long hectic evening.
- 1846 [1845], Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Boston: Anti-Slavery Office:
- If at any one time of my life more than another, I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six months of my stay with Mr. Covey.
- 1900, Edith Wharton, chapter V, in The Touchstone[1], New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons:
- […] he said to himself that in the last hour he had sounded the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs of it, the very bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having always, as long as the two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel.
Usage notes
[edit]- The singular form dreg is far less common, but the phrase to the last dreg still has currency.
Synonyms
[edit]- debris, deposit, draff, dross, exuviate, feculence, grounds, grouts, lees, loser, orts, outcast, rabble, refuse, residue, residuum, riffraff, rubbish, scum, sediment, settling, trash, trub
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]settled sediment
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the worst and lowest
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