English

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Etymology

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From Revelation 9:1–12.[1]

Noun

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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

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References

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  1. ^ The Holy Bible, [] (King James Version), London: [] Robert Barker, [], 1611, →OCLC, 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

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