Word.ws English Dictionary

at bank

at bank prepositional phrase: on the surface; at or around the mine entrance.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (obsolete) On the surface; at or around the mine entrance.
    • This case would, no doubt, excite the attention of all professional men, and they would, he thought, ventilate the flues more extensively than they had done hitherto; but it had staggered him as to whether it was advisable to place the boilers underground or at bank. Unless the pits were very deep...1861, North of England Institute of Mining Engineers, Transactions, volume 9, page 170
    • We are using compressed air for hauling and pumping in a coal seam at a depth of 900 feet from the surface, and strange to say the pressure gauge attached to the air receiver at bank reads 90 pounds pressure per square inch above the pressure of the atmosphere, whereas, the pressure gauge attached...January 1895, “Solutions to Questions which Appeared in the November Number and for which Prizes Have Been Awarded.”, in The Colliery Engineer and Metal Miner, volume 15, number 6

Forms of at bank

alternative format the bank

Origin of at bank

From at + bank (“ground at the top of a shaft”).

Questions about at bank

What does at bank mean?
At bank means on the surface; at or around the mine entrance.
What part of speech is at bank?
At bank is a prepositional phrase.

Words near at bank in the dictionary

  1. at any given moment
  2. at any hand
  3. at any rate
  4. at any risk
  5. at arm's length
  6. at bank
  7. at bar
  8. at bat
  9. at bats
  10. at bay
  11. at best

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: at bank (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “at bank.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/at_bank. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.