sewage
Americannoun
noun
Etymology
Origin of sewage
Explanation
The waste water that flows down drains and through pipes from toilets and sinks is called sewage. There's nothing quite like smelling sewage on a hot summer day. Have you ever wondered where the soapy, dirty water from your washing machine goes after your clothes are clean? It flows down the drain into a pipe, and is carried with other sewage out to the street and your city's wastewater system, or into a private septic tank. Sewage comes from the now-obsolete verb sew, "to drain or draw off water."
Vocabulary lists containing sewage
The Omnivore's Dilemma
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This Week in Words: Current Events Vocab for June 8–June 14, 2025
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Unit 9, Week 3
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The January rupture spewed 243 million gallons of raw sewage into the waterway in one of the worst wastewater disasters in U.S. history.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 22, 2026
After the spill, the utility diverted more than two billion gallons of raw sewage to the nearly 200-year-old Chesapeake and Ohio canal to avoid more releases into the Potomac.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 20, 2026
Muir acknowledged that there was a "concern about raw sewage being pumped" into the lough.
From BBC • Apr. 14, 2026
They frequently appear in wastewater and can end up in biosolid fertilizer, also called sewage sludge, which is produced during wastewater treatment.
From Science Daily • Apr. 11, 2026
The White River is beautiful in the abstract—blue herons and geese and deer and all that stuff—but the actual water itself smells like human sewage.
From "Turtles All the Way Down" by John Green
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
