Dumpster

How to spell dumpster

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dumpster

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dumpster mean?

1. nounA large metal container for rubbish, designed to be emptied or carried away by a special truck.

Dumpster in a sentence

• The builders hauled the old plasterboard out to the dumpster behind the shop.

• Every Friday morning the lorry lifts and empties the dumpster in the car park.

Where does dumpster come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word began life in the United States as a trademark rather than an ordinary noun. In the 1930s the Dempster Brothers company of Knoxville, Tennessee, manufactured a large metal container that could be mechanically hoisted and emptied by a special truck, and they marketed the system as the Dempster-Dumpster. The brand name was a clever blend of the family surname Dempster with the everyday verb 'dump', meaning to tip or unload, which itself probably came from a Scandinavian or Middle English source describing a heavy fall. Over the decades the trademark slipped into general use and lost its capital letter, so that 'dumpster' now simply means any large refuse bin, much as 'hoover' and 'biro' became common nouns. The hidden 'p' before the 's' is the usual spelling trap, a relic of the original 'dump' inside the blended name. In Britain the same object is more often called a skip, so the word is recognised everywhere but used most naturally in North America.

How the word is built

• dump (to tip out, unload)
• -ster (originally from the brand Dempster, reshaped to look like an agent suffix)