What's the difference between pothole and trench?

Pothole


Definition:

  • (n.) A circular hole formed in the rocky beds of rivers by the grinding action of stones or gravel whirled round by the water in what was at first a natural depression of the rock.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The George Bush campaign juggernaut hit the first serious pothole of its cash-fuelled drive to the presidency yesterday, as the Texas governor tried in vain to fend off questions about whether he had used cocaine as a young man.
  • (2) The Washington DC transportation department put out a tweet saying that the coming apocalypse would have an impact on road maintenance: "Sorry, we will no longer be able to fill your potholes after Saturday."
  • (3) They once journeyed six hours out of sprawling Mexico City to deliver an order, using specially designed backpacks that protect the food from the city’s potholed streets.
  • (4) The heat is getting oppressive but we stay alert and try to move with the flow, sticking to the left as much as possible and keeping an eye out for potholes and drain covers whose grilles face the direction of travel – lying in wait to trap unwary bike tyres.
  • (5) On an otherwise ordinary-looking, potholed street in the district of Victoria Island in Lagos, Nigeria , is a stone encrusted gate with personalised initials.
  • (6) After eight hours of rallying, Kuti was dismissive of accepting anything short of a full governmental U-turn as he settled down to a spliff in his home, a rambling two-storey affair down a potholed road.
  • (7) A potholed gravel road runs to a campsite at the mouth of the Mattole river and from there you can wander south down the coast for 25 miles before you come to the next road, at Shelter Cove.
  • (8) It’s dawn and it’s sub-zero and it’s a potholed car park in Vilnius, eastern Lithuania, and a hobbit is preparing to tell the world about the Holocaust.
  • (9) The number 38 bus from Bury had skidded out of control on an icy pothole and crushed her against the wall of the Job Centre.
  • (10) I damaged my car and tyre after hitting a pothole in the dark.
  • (11) Weah embraces the familiar imagery of African nobility - the lion - and walks with a clear sense of self-worth through the smoking, potholed streets of Monrovia.
  • (12) Those potholes, cracks and poor surfaces add up to a $4.3tn investment deficit, according to the ASCE.
  • (13) Temperatures climb above 40C even before the sun has hit the pitted, potholed surface of the streets through which he pushes his vegetable barrow day after day.
  • (14) Walking through the dismal Leipzig suburbs feels like being transported back 20 years: there are potholes, weeds growing through the tarmac, dozens of uniform grey apartment blocks.
  • (15) Only 2% of the country's roads are paved, and these are riddled with potholes.
  • (16) The road falls and rises to the horizon like a highway across the American midwest, except that the surface is brick-red mud and stones and potholes.
  • (17) The hall where it was held is only a stone’s throw from Jaywick , the jumble of former holiday chalets and potholed streets that is reckoned to be the poorest council ward in England: on the face of it, a symbol of the kind of deep social problems that tend to be synonymous with political apathy.
  • (18) We even have an app to report potholes in the city, which in one month registered more than 2,000.
  • (19) If you can show the council was aware of a dangerous pothole, and yet several weeks later you drove into it and damaged your car, you have a claim.
  • (20) All very idealistic except for the potholes, lorries and dust!

Trench


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To cut; to form or shape by cutting; to make by incision, hewing, or the like.
  • (v. t.) To fortify by cutting a ditch, and raising a rampart or breastwork with the earth thrown out of the ditch; to intrench.
  • (v. t.) To cut furrows or ditches in; as, to trench land for the purpose of draining it.
  • (v. t.) To dig or cultivate very deeply, usually by digging parallel contiguous trenches in succession, filling each from the next; as, to trench a garden for certain crops.
  • (v. i.) To encroach; to intrench.
  • (v. i.) To have direction; to aim or tend.
  • (v. t.) A long, narrow cut in the earth; a ditch; as, a trench for draining land.
  • (v. t.) An alley; a narrow path or walk cut through woods, shrubbery, or the like.
  • (v. t.) An excavation made during a siege, for the purpose of covering the troops as they advance toward the besieged place. The term includes the parallels and the approaches.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Its boot always held a bivouac bag, a trenching tool of some sort and a towel and trunks, in case he passed somewhere interesting to sleep, dig, or swim.
  • (2) The RSC’s Erica Whyman stages a story inspired by a local man, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment’s Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, who was known as the cartoonist of the trenches and survived the war to work at the original Shakespeare Memorial theatre.
  • (3) Stephen Fisher, one of the archaeologists recording the site, says digging the trenches would also have been training for the men, who would soon have to do it for real, and the little slit trenches scattered across the site, just big enough for one man to cower in, might represent their first efforts.
  • (4) Upon segregation of the conidium from the phialide cell by conidial wall formation, 'trench-like' invaginations gradually appeared in the plasma membrane and a disorganized rodlet pattern was formed on the outer surface of the maturing conidial wall.
  • (5) The field was taped off while a mechanical digger clawed at the ground, making parallel trenches in the sandy earth.
  • (6) Scores of archaeologists working in a waterlogged trench through the wettest summer and coldest winter in living memory have recovered more than 10,000 objects from Roman London , including writing tablets, amber, a well with ritual deposits of pewter, coins and cow skulls, thousands of pieces of pottery, a unique piece of padded and stitched leather – and the largest collection of lucky charms in the shape of phalluses ever found on a single site.
  • (7) He sees HS2 as a "huge trench across the country where we can learn an awful lot about new sites.
  • (8) But his attitude gradually hardened, particularly after he reached the trenches.
  • (9) "It looks solid," said Jean Pascal Zanders, a Belgian expert who runs a blog on chemical weapons called The Trench .
  • (10) What they learn can be summed up in one word: trenches.
  • (11) The archaeologists had to wear slippers to preserve the site which, at the bottom of a two-metre trench, picked up much damp.
  • (12) A variety of cold exposure injuries were discussed, including frostnip, chilblains, trench foot, frostbite, and hypothermia.
  • (13) Alan Trench, an academic specialising in devolution and adviser to expert government commissions, said: "It's clear that Labour voters generally have concerns about how things are at the moment.
  • (14) But if trapped deep inside wreckage or an underwater trench, the effectiveness can be hindered.
  • (15) French troops wearing an early form of gas mask in the trenches during the second Battle of Ypres in 1915.
  • (16) Keeping within the string lines of your footprint, dig a trench about 15cm deep and lay the foundation stones flat and level.
  • (17) But according to Wayne Cocroft, an English Heritage expert on wartime archaeology, although 20 other trench training sites have been recorded across Britain, many have been damaged by later development, and both the scale and the state of preservation of the Gosport complex is exceptional.
  • (18) Working in a location to the southeast of Kathmandu, Paul Tapponnier, an earth scientist at the Earth Observatory of Singapore , and his team dug trenches across the fault and used charcoal to date when it had moved.
  • (19) There are no trenches, barbed wire fences or tank traps.
  • (20) Accessory glandular tissues were atrophied and debris filled the trenches of the papillae.