Word.ws English Dictionary

the pits

the pits noun: something miserable or unpleasant.

Noun

the pits pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only, slang) Something miserable or unpleasant.
    • This whole experience has been the pits.
    • A bad exam experience would be ‘I'm wasted’ at Howard,..‘It was the pits’ at Vassar.1953, Joseph Becker Phillips, Malcolm Muir, Raymond Moley, Rex Smith, Samuel Thurston Williamson (contributors), Newsweek, volume 42, page 54
    Synonyms:
    the dumps

the pits meaning in Malayalam

the pits in Malayalam

the worst, rock-bottom, the lowest of the low
പാതാളം, ഏറ്റവും ചീത്തയായ സ്ഥിതി, അടിത്തട്ട്, തറ, ദാരിദ്രത്തിയോ ദുരിതത്തിയോ അടിത്തട്ട്, അതിനീചത

Synonyms of the pits

Origin of the pits

Theorized to be a shortened form of armpits, i.e., somewhere or something unpleasant or undesirable. First use appears c. 1953. See cite below.

Questions about the pits

What does the pits mean?
The pits means something miserable or unpleasant.
What is the pits in Malayalam?
The pits in Malayalam is പാതാളം, ഏറ്റവും ചീത്തയായ സ്ഥിതി, അടിത്തട്ട്. See The pits meaning in Malayalam.
What part of speech is the pits?
The pits is a noun.

Words near the pits in the dictionary

  1. The Pilliga
  2. The Pinnacles
  3. the Pips
  4. the piss out of
  5. the pitcher goes so often to the well that it is broken at last
  6. the pits
  7. the plague
  8. the pleasure is all mine
  9. the plot thickens
  10. the plural of anecdote is not data
  11. the pock

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: the pits (page history and authors); the pits (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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: “the pits.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/the_pits. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.