basin
Part of speech: noun
verb
Morphological type: simple
Topics: geography
natural-sciences
Etymology: Etymology tree
Proto-Celtic *baskis
Gaulish *baskisder.
Vulgar Latin bacca
Vulgar Latin *baccinum
Old French bacinbor.
Middle English basyn
English basin
From Middle English basyn, from Old French bacin, from Vulgar Latin *baccinum (“wide bowl”).
Inflected forms:
form: basins
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: bason
pos: noun
tags: alternative
form: basins
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: basining
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: basinning
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
rare
form: basined
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: basined
pos: verb
tags: past
form: basinned
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
rare
form: basinned
pos: verb
tags: past
rare
form: bason
pos: verb
tags: alternative
Senses:
gloss: A wide bowl for washing, sometimes affixed to a wall.
pos: noun
examples: First, as you know, my house within the city
Is richly furnished with plate and gold,
Basins and ewers to lave her dainty hands;
After that he poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.
What then, you will say, must a man sit with his chops and fingers up to the ears and knuckles in grease? No; let those who cannot eat without defiling themselves, step into another room, provided with basons and towels: but I think it would be better to institute schools, where youth may learn to eat their victuals, without daubing themselves, or giving offence to the eyes of one another.
Everybody had washed before going to bed, apparently, and the bowls were ringed with a dark sediment which the hard, alkaline water had not dissolved. Shutting the door on this disorder, he turned back to the kitchen, took Mahailey’s tin basin, doused his face and head in cold water, and began to plaster down his wet hair.
gloss: A shallow bowl used for a single serving of a drink or liquidy food.
pos: noun
tags: obsolete
examples: […] Mr. John Knightley, ashamed of his ill-humour, was now all kindness and attention; and so particularly solicitous for the comfort of her father, as to seem—if not quite ready to join him in a basin of gruel—perfectly sensible of its being exceedingly wholesome […]
They have a good basin of coffee or cocoa for breakfast […]
He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity: ¶ ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’
1893, Gilbert Parker, “The March of the White Guard,” in Tavistock Tales, New York: Tait Sons & Co., p. 27,
Gaspé Toujours is drinking a basin of tea, and Jeff Hyde is fitfully dozing by the fire.
A steaming basin of coffee or soup revived them greatly, and even having to decide which of these refreshments they would have, and helping themselves to bread, pulled them together a little.
gloss: A depression, natural or artificial, containing water.
pos: noun
examples: This shortly brought them to a bewitching spring, whose basin was incrusted with a frostwork of glittering crystals […]
The fountains were plashing musically into marble and alabaster basins.
There was a stone basin of clear but motionless water, and the heavy reddish-and-yellow arches went round the courtyard with warrior-like fatality, their bases in dark shadow.
gloss: An area of land from which water drains into a common outlet; drainage basin.
pos: noun
examples: Devils Lake is where I began my career as a limnologist in 1964, studying the lake’s neotenic salamanders and chironomids, or midge flies. […] The Devils Lake Basin is an endorheic, or closed, basin covering about 9,800 square kilometers in northeastern North Dakota.
gloss: A shallow depression in a rock formation, such as an area of down-folded rock that has accumulated a thick layer of sediments, or an area scooped out by water erosion.
pos: noun
gloss: To create a concavity or depression in.
pos: verb
examples: Then axial subsidence basined the surface of the dome.
Basining is the process that gives the faces of the dies their radius, or concavity. Depending on the production method, the planchet metal flows either toward or away from the center of the dies. The minting facilities "basined" the dies after they were delivered from the Philadelphia Mint's Engraving Department.
Of course, this is exactly what did happen—the antiquated practice of basining the dies was cast aside for the Lincoln Cent.
Scandinavia was basined under the load of the last or so-called Würm ice-cap.
gloss: To serve as or become a basin.
pos: verb
examples: To what degree this stress field formed in response to eastward movement of the African plate, to northward movement of the African plate relative to Europe, to basinning of the shelf between the eastern Canaries and Africa, or to other causes is as yet unknown.
The eastward pinching and thinning were caused by the rapid basining of the plateau over the Pasco-Richland area in south-central Washington.
Walls basined at a ca. 45° angle on the southwest side, but on the west and north there was little basining, with the floor sloping gently up to the original ground surface.
Deformation of the rocks involved in anticline formation increased as deformation of the rocks involved in basining decreased, and the less intense structures of the norfold facies developed in both regions.
gloss: To shelter or enclose in a basin.
pos: verb
examples: A moan as of distant wind or thunder portended something at hand, the approach of which, basinned as we were among high broken ridges, patchy-scrubbed heights, and penned in by a maze of steep-sided gullies or gorges — we had no chance of observing, until it cam down in hurricane strength.
A row of trees was basined in the latter part of April, and by the latter part of July, a little over three months, there was a remarkable improvement in the appearance of the basined row compared with the check trees.
Caesar's subjects bathed in Caesar's blood basinned in the purple pool of Calpurnia's dream; my sister slept in an ogre's thought and woke up on the hook of a cannibal finger.
They took a narrow path through the snow, up the hill which basined the village, and on to a plateau, a stretch of sparsely treed land.
Well back under this natural shelter, basined in the hollowed rock, a blessed pool of fair water lay unwrinkled by even a flutter of breeze.
Related words: Basin in the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition, 1911)
Derived words: Amazon Basin
Badwater Basin
basinal
basin and range topography
basin cut
basinful
basinless
basinlike
basin of attraction
basinward
basinwide
canal basin
catch-basin
catchment basin
Chad Basin
debris basin
detention basin
drainage basin
Foxe basin
handbasin
infiltration basin
interbasin
intrabasin
Judith Basin County
macrobasin
Mediterranean basin
metabasin
model basin
multibasin
oceanic basin
palaeobasin
paleobasin
pudding-basin
pudding basin
pudding basin haircut
receiving basin
recharge basin
retarding basin
retention basin
river basin
sedimentary basin
ship model basin
slop-basin
subbasin
sugar basin
Tarim Basin
The Basin
tidal basin
washbasin
washhand-basin
Translations: