dunny man
- noun
- Archaic
:
limpiador de letrinas
- The dunny man arrived early every Friday to empty the old backyard toilet.
Examples
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When the sewer was finally connected, the dunny man's visits stopped.
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Many dunny men worked in rural areas.
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As a child, she was terrified of the dunny man and his noisy truck.
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The dunny man arrived early in the morning.
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The dunny man came to clean the outdoor toilet, leaving it fresh and empty.
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Every week, the dunny man would drive around the neighborhood, collecting waste from the outdoor toilets.
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In the past, the dunny man was an essential worker for homes without proper sewage systems.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound is a straightforward combination of 'dunny' (outdoor toilet) + 'man' (person/agent), so a learner who knows both constituents will naturally infer it refers to a person associated with the dunny (i.e., someone who cleans or services it). The agentive pattern 'X man' is a regular, cross-linguistically common formation in English, making the meaning predictable despite the term's regional/dialectal nature.
Etymology
Dunny man comes from long ago in Australia, where dunny was a small outdoor 'toilet' and a man would come with a bucket or noisy truck to empty it. So, people used dunny man to mean 'a person who empties or cleans outdoor toilets'.
