dump

American weather reports make the storm the subject and the amount the object: a front dumps eight inches overnight, a squall dumps hail on the highway. The verb is kept for heavy, sudden falls; a light dusting of snow is not said to dump anything.

The grammar runs on from and to: the data is the object, its source follows from, and its destination follows to, as in dumping the ROM from a cartridge or dumping a database to a file. Collectors and archivists use it for wholesale copying meant to preserve what a device holds, a different job from dumping memory to chase a bug.

What gets dumped here is often small and specific: a stack, a table, a cache or one variable, written to the console or a file exactly as it stands. The aim is diagnosis rather than safekeeping, since the output is compared with what should be there, and the printout is the same kind of listing as the one a crash leaves.

The classic case is the core dump: the operating system writes out what a program held in memory at the moment it failed, so the crash can be studied afterward. It reads as columns of addresses and values rather than prose, and it serves a programmer the way a flight recorder serves an investigator.

Supermarkets and bookstores use it as a trade word, often in the compound dump display: a temporary unit, usually cardboard, stacked with copies of one item and set at the end of an aisle to move goods in bulk. It was already at home in the trade when Milton Alexander's Display Ideas for Super Markets (1958) explained how a stand keeps its dump restocked.

Around a mine, the dump may be worthless waste rock or ore waiting to be processed; either way it marks where digging has been. Old dumps draw prospectors for that reason, since what one generation of miners threw away another may still profit from.

On Australian beaches it is the wave that does the dumping, with the swimmer as its object. In Chappelli Has the Last Laugh (1980), Ian Chappell leans on a passing wave which dumped me. The word records the slam of the fall, not the wetting, and it is the throwing-down verb with the sea doing the throwing.

In Of the Conduct of the Understanding, written before 1705, John Locke pictures people sunk in this state: they see nothing that passes before their eyes, hear none of the talk around them, and when roused seem like men brought back from some remote region. It is a fit of inattention, not of sadness, which separates it from low spirits.

The coin is the plug, not the ring. To ease an acute shortage of money in 1813, Governor Lachlan Macquarie bought Spanish silver dollars and had their centers punched out: the ring became the holey dollar, worth five shillings, and the small disc became the dump. The word is historical, used in Australia and Canada for coins made this way.

Northern English rivers have their own dump, unrelated to tipping or thumping despite the spelling: it is kin to Scots dump, "a hole in the ground", and to Dutch dompen, "to dip or sink". Nothing is thrown away here; the hollow lies in the riverbed and holds water. It is a regional word, not one in general use.

Shakespeare uses it both ways: The Two Gentlemen of Verona asks someone to tune a deploring dump, while Romeo and Juliet calls for some merry dump to comfort me, where the word means little more than a tune. It is obsolete, and readers now meet it chiefly in writing of Shakespeare's age.

The dance is obsolete, and its name is one to recognize in older writing rather than to use. In a passage about music, a dump may just as well be a mournful tune, so the surrounding words decide which is meant.

This obsolete Scots verb stays closest to the word's likely root, Old Norse dumpa, "to thump", whose Danish relative dumpe means "to fall suddenly"; the word may imitate the sound of something falling. It keeps the blow and the weight behind it, while the everyday throwing-down verb grew from the same source and has taken over.

It belongs with dumpling rather than with tipping or thumping: a dump is a thick, rough lump, and a dumpling is a small one made of dough. The sense is archaic British usage, met in older writing, while dumpling is the form people still use.

Chuck-farthing players pitched these lead counters at a mark, so the counter is a thick, rough lump put to work. William Hone's Every Day Book (1825) describes leaden capons, figures of cocks and hens, pitched at by leaden dumps. Like the game itself, the word is archaic and survives mainly in accounts of old British pastimes.