bottomless pit

English

Etymology

From Revelation 9:1–12.

Noun

bottomless pit (plural bottomless pits)

1. A pit with no visible bottom and 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, Donald Frederick Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe:

     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／无底洞 (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
• Italian: pozzo senza fondo m
• Serbo-Croatian: vreća bez dna
• Spanish: pozo sin fondo, tragaldabas (es)

Further reading

• bottomless pit on Wikipedia.Wikipedia