Word.ws English Dictionary

pan man

pan man noun: a person employed to empty the contents of the outside toilet (i.e. human excrement) at suburban houses (and similar). Rendered obsolete by the introduction of plumbed (i.e. piped) sewerage systems.

Noun

pan man (plural pan men)

  1. (obsolete) A person employed to empty the contents of the outside toilet (i.e. human excrement) at suburban houses (and similar). Rendered obsolete by the introduction of plumbed (i.e. piped) sewerage systems.
    • The 'dunny' down the back yard was emptied by the council's pan man once a week. — Susan Marsden, essay Argyle, a port worker's home 19 Forbes Street Carrington New South Wales, describing 1920s way of life there...

Forms of pan man

pluralpan men

Questions about pan man

What does pan man mean?
Pan man means a person employed to empty the contents of the outside toilet (i.e. human excrement) at suburban houses (and similar). Rendered obsolete by the introduction of plumbed (i.e. piped) sewerage systems.
What part of speech is pan man?
Pan man is a noun.
What is the plural of pan man?
The plural of pan man is pan men.

Words near pan man in the dictionary

  1. pan fried
  2. pan fries
  3. pan fry
  4. pan frying
  5. pan haggerty
  6. pan man
  7. pan men
  8. pan out
  9. pan pipe
  10. pan pipes
  11. pan pizza

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pan man (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.

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Cite this entry: “pan man.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pan_man. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.