potter's field
2
9.8
- noun
- /ˈpɒtərz fiːld/
:
campo de los pobres
- Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, is the potter's field of Jerusalem.
- buried in a potter's field
Examples
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The point is that these people deserve a little more respect than just to be dug up at the state's convenience and dropped into the nearest potter's field.
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Most of them just go to the potter's field.
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She was buried in a potter's field just north of town, to be forgotten by all.
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When guards came with a stretcher, he expected to be dumped into a potter's field or worse.
Fiction book (2002) -
She was buried on Hart Island, New York City's potter's field.
Academic text (2000) -
She was buried in a potter's field just north of town, to be forgotten by all.
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The unidentified body ended up in a potter's field section of a Tampa cemetery, in an unmarked grave known only as Jane Doe 82120.
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Before long, he was filing front-page stories, like this tale of a drifter buried in Denver's version of potter's field.
Synonyms
21
3.9
A place where people are buried, like a cemetery
Surface Forms
Morphology
potter's + field
A B1 learner who knows 'potter' (a maker of pottery) and 'field' (a plot of land) would likely infer a field owned or used by a potter, not a burial ground for the poor or unclaimed. The phrase's burial-ground meaning is historical/Biblical and conventionalized, so the overall sense is idiomatic and not derivable from the constituents.
Etymology
The name potter's field may come from land where a potter dug clay for pots, leaving holes in the field. Those cheap, empty places were used to bury people with no money or family, so today the phrase means 'a burial ground for people who are unknown, poor, or unclaimed'.