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• n  a foul or degraded condition
• n  a heap of dung or refuse

• Only his daughter Sylvelie, a flower-on-the-dunghill type, regarded him without loathing.
• On a dunghill back of a farmhouse at Mareuil-en-D1e, the cousins held the famous conversation that sired the fabulous New York Daily News.
• He wants to be acknowledged as the only cock on the dunghill.

• midden
• muckheap
• muckhill

News & Articles

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• On the Trails: Middens
  Middens. This interesting and useful word comes ultimately from an old Scandinavian term for a dunghill. The sense has been broadened to include heaps of all kinds of refuse and junk.
  April 11, 2014 - Juneau Empire

Quotes

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• James Joyce in Vancouver Sun (subscription)
  Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world, a mother's love is not,James Joyce said.
• Max Hastings in BBC News
  Former Evening Standard editor Max Hastings writes: "We have the wretched spectacle of a BBC chairman resigning while Alastair Campbell crows from the summit of his dunghill."
• Garry Wills in International Herald Tribune
  Trying to find a construct, 'the historical Jesus,' is not like finding diamonds in a dunghill, but like finding New York City at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean,Wills says. "It is a mixing of categories, or rather of wholly different...