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Glite Dictionary
dust bowl

dust bowl

3 6.5
A dry area with strong dust storms that ruined farms in the 1930s
  • noun
  • /dʌst boʊl/
  • US
translation icon : zona de polvo
  • The Oklahoma dust bowl rose in part from ignorant farming practices.
  • dust bowl in Oklahoma
  • the Great dust bowl
  • become a dust bowl

He was dealing with a Dust Bowl, then dealt with World War Two.

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Examples

  • " In a certain sense, we're in a dust bowl," Okin says.

    Blog text (20)

  • In the 1930s, poor farming techniques in the Midwest created the dust bowl; much of the topsoil was lost in the Atlantic Ocean.

    Blog text (11)

  • Then the dust bowl hit and you couldn't grow much out here.

    The Dog Lover (2016)

  • - When I was a kid-- - That's real interesting but is there some place in this dust bowl I can get something to drink?

    U Turn (1997)

  • The region, in the heart of the 1930s dust bowl, is flat, arid, and sparsely populated; in 2000, there were 110,333 people and more than 900,000 cows.

    Academic text (2003)

  • LAMONT, Calif. (KBAK/KBFX) - The 1930s dust bowl destroyed thousands of acres of farmland and caused the largest migration of Americans to the West Coast.

    Blog text (10)

  • During the Great Depression, many families were forced to leave their homes due to the severe dust bowl that devastated the region.

  • The environmental disaster known as the dust bowl caused significant hardship for farmers in the central United States during the 1930s.

  • The combination of drought and poor agricultural practices turned the fertile plains into a dust bowl filled with swirling dust storms.

Surface Forms

dust bowl singular
dust bowls plural

Morphology

dust + bowl

The compound 'dust bowl' is compositionally formed from 'dust' (tiny dry particles) + 'bowl' and denotes a place characterized by dust accumulation or heavy dust storms; a B1 learner who knows both words can reasonably infer it means a dusty region. The historical specificity to the 1930s is encyclopedic, but the core sense 'an area suffering severe dust' follows clear compounding patterns and is therefore immediately understandable.

Etymology

Dust bowl comes from the 1930s in the United States, when drought and strong wind turned the topsoil into huge clouds of dust that blew across farms. People pictured the land as a 'bowl' of dust, so dust bowl now means 'a region suffering severe dust storms and ruined farms'.