colliery

English

WOTD – 18 June 2009
Daw Mill colliery in the United Kingdom.

Etymology

    From collier + -y.

    Pronunciation

    • (UK) IPA(key): /ˈkɒl.jə.ɹi/
      • Audio (Southern England):(file)
    • (US, Atlantic Canada) IPA(key): /ˈkɑ.ljə.ɹi/, /ˈkɑ.ljɚ.i/
      • Audio (Texas); [ˈkɑ.ljɚ.i]:(file)
    • (Canada) IPA(key): /ˈkɒl.jə.ɹi/, /ˈkɒl.jɚ.i/
    • (Australia) IPA(key): /ˈkɔl.jə.ɹi/
    • (New Zealand) IPA(key): [ˈkɔ̟l.jə.ɹi]

    Noun

    colliery (plural collieries)

    1. (UK) An underground coal mine, together with its surface buildings.
      • 1928, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, [Germany?]: Privately printed, →OCLC:
        Sir Geoffrey, Clifford's father, was intensely ridiculous, chopping down his trees, and weeding men out of his colliery to shove them into the war [...] From the rather dismal rooms at Wragby she heard the rattle-rattle of the screens at the pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the clink-clink of shunting trucks, and the hoarse little whistle of the colliery locomotives.
      • 1938, Xavier Herbert, “Chapter VII”, in Capricornia‎[1], page 91:
        From the hillock a score of red paths diverged as black ones do from a colliery, one of them leading to the homestead itself […]
      • 2018, James Bridle, “Complexity”, in The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, Verso Books, →ISBN, page 114:
        In Rugeley, England, inside a sky-blue warehouse the size of nine football pitches on the site of an old colliery, Amazon employs hundreds of people wearing orange tabards who push trolleys down deep aisles of shelving, stacking them with books, DVDs, electronics and other goods.
    2. (US) A facility that supplies coal.

    Derived terms

    Translations

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