the pits
5
8.8
- idiom
- Informal
:
lo peor
- He described his experience at that job as the pits, filled with stress and unhappiness.
- the pit of her stomach
- the pits of hell
Examples
-
Mother did it because she loves us, but home education is the pits.
Fiction book (2000) -
The Decamp bus situation is the pits.
Blog text (23) -
Ugh, this movie was the pits.
Blog text (20) -
"Life is the pits."
Academic text (1995) -
It's the pits.
Fiction book (2002) -
Living in this rundown apartment is really the pits.
-
After losing the match, the team felt like they were really the pits.
Synonyms
∞
3.7
A very painful or difficult experience
51
7.9
A very dirty, unpleasant, and dangerous place
9
6.8
A place or situation that causes great suffering and pain
3
7.3
An unpleasant, chaotic place where people act badly toward each other
2
9.0
A very deep feeling of sadness with no hope
A place that is very dirty and full of trash and bad smells
A small dirty house or room where poor people live
Antonyms
How Unpleasant
Surface Forms
Morphology
the + pit
The meaning 'a situation that is extremely unpleasant' is an idiomatic, slang sense that is not directly derivable from 'the' + 'pit' (which more commonly denotes a hole or cavity). Although 'pit' can metaphorically suggest an unpleasant place in some contexts, that inferential leap is culture-specific and not reliably available to a B1 learner who only knows the literal constituents. Therefore the overall meaning must typically be learned as an idiom rather than composed from the parts.
Etymology
The pits may come from old coal mines called 'pits', which were dark, wet, and very unpleasant places to work. Because those places were so bad, people began to call any really awful situation 'the pits', meaning 'extremely unpleasant'.