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Glite Dictionary
kitchen midden

kitchen midden

9.9
A heap of old shells, bones, and kitchen waste from people long ago
  • noun
  • /ˈkɪtʃən ˈmɪdən/
  • Specialized
translation icon : madriguera
  • During the excavation, the team carefully documented the layers of the kitchen midden to understand its history.

Examples

  • Archaeologists discovered numerous artifacts buried within the kitchen midden near the ancient settlement.

  • This is the kitchen midden anthropologists will be rummaging through a million years from now.

    Fiction book (2002)

  • The kitchen midden revealed a wealth of information about the dietary habits of prehistoric people.

Synonyms

midden
vskitchen midden
  • Specialized
1 9.9

A pile of old rubbish and animal bones left by people

is a specific archaeological mound of shells bones and domestic waste marking ancient settlement

Surface Forms

kitchen midden singular
kitchen middens plural

Morphology

kitchen + midden

The meaning is directly derivable from combining 'kitchen' (domestic/household) with 'midden' (a heap of waste), so a learner who knows both constituents can infer it denotes a household refuse heap or archaeological deposit of domestic waste. This is a straightforward noun+noun compositional pattern found across languages, making the expression transparent to learners who know the words.

Etymology

Kitchen midden comes from real piles of kitchen waste called a midden, made of shells, bones and food scraps left near old homes. So these heaps show where people once lived and are the places people study to learn about the past.