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dumpster

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ˈdʌmpstɚ//

A large, usually metal trash receptacle designed to be hoisted up by a garbage truck in order to be emptied.

noun

  1. 1

    A large, usually metal trash receptacle designed to be hoisted up by a garbage truck in order to be emptied.

    He realized with a brief shudder that Kurt probably used this flashlight while nipple-deep in dumpsters, had an image of Kurt transferring it from his gloved hands to his mouth and back again as he dug through bags of kitchen and toilet waste, looking for discarded technology.

    […]with the uncanny ability to always look like he just woke up in a dumpster

Etymology

Genericized brand name, from blend of dump + Dempster. The original brand (and some associated things) are no longer trademarked, because the three trademarks involved have either expired or been cancelled. By surface analysis, dump + -ster.

verb

  1. 1

    slangTo discard or dispose something, especially to throw into a dumpster.

  2. 2

    slangTo humiliatingly destroy, utterly demolish (an opponent).

  3. 3

    slangSynonym of dumpster dive

Forms

plural
dumpsters
past tense
dumpstered
past participle
dumpstered
present participle
dumpstering
third person singular
dumpsters
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).