dropshaft

English

Alternative forms

drop shaft, drop-shaft

Etymology

Compound of drop +‎ shaft.

Noun

dropshaft (plural dropshafts)

A vertical shaft which objects can drop through.
- 1992 April 3, Gary Washburn, “Great Chicago Loop Flood cripples businesses”, in Chicago Tribune‎^[1], archived from the original on 2023-01-01:
  Melas said that district engineers had located Deep Tunnel dropshafts that were near a portion of the freight tunnels and that they would drill, cut or blast through to the flooded areas "as soon as possible."
- 2006, Maurizio Brocchini, Filippo Trivellato, Vorticity and Turbulence Effects in Fluid Structure Interaction, WIT Press, →ISBN, page 161:
  The water flows from a large suitably fed tank into the dropshaft through a sharp-edged orifice, whose diameter (Do) is 100mm large.
- 2022 September 12, Patty Wetli, “Chicago Dries Out From Intense Deluge. ‘We Don’t See Rainfall Rates That High’”, in WTTW‎^[2], archived from the original on 2022-10-10:
  The downpour led to some dramatic images of stranded motorists and geysers bursting through manhole covers. The spouts are a rare effect which occurs when too much water rushes into a dropshaft and traps air that’s normally vented.
- 2023 January 11, Daniel Beekman, “Seattle’s huge sewage tunnel is halfway drilled. Take a look inside”, in The Seattle Times‎^[3], archived from the original on 2023-01-24:
  The gigantic drill that began digging the deep-bore tunnel from Ballard to Wallingford in 2021 passed its halfway mark last month, chewing through soil that gets hauled away to a Ballard drop shaft (a vertical hole that reaches down to the tunneling site from street level) in 25-ton train carloads.

References

Jesse Sheidlower, editor (2001–2025), “dropshaft, n.”, in Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.