/ˈbeɪs(ə)n/
OriginFrom Middle English basyn, from Old French bacin, from Vulgar Latin *baccinum (“wide bowl”).
- A wide bowl for washing, sometimes affixed to a wall.
“First, as you know, my house within the city
Is richly furnished with plate and gold,
Basins and ewers to lave her dainty hands;”
“After that he poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.”
“What then, you will say, must a man sit with his chops and fingers up to the ears and knuckles in grease? No; let those who cannot eat without defiling themselves, step into another room, provided wit”
- obsoleteA shallow bowl used for a single serving of a drink or liquidy food.
“[…] Mr. John Knightley, ashamed of his ill-humour, was now all kindness and attention; and so particularly solicitous for the comfort of her father, as to seem—if not quite ready to join him in a basi”
“They have a good basin of coffee or cocoa for breakfast […]”
“He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity: ¶ ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’”
- A depression, natural or artificial, containing water.
“This shortly brought them to a bewitching spring, whose basin was incrusted with a frostwork of glittering crystals […]”
“The fountains were plashing musically into marble and alabaster basins.”
“There was a stone basin of clear but motionless water, and the heavy reddish-and-yellow arches went round the courtyard with warrior-like fatality, their bases in dark shadow.”
- An area of land from which water drains into a common outlet; drainage basin.
“Devils Lake is where I began my career as a limnologist in 1964, studying the lake’s neotenic salamanders and chironomids, or midge flies. […] The Devils Lake Basin is an endorheic, or closed, basin c”
- A shallow depression in a rock formation, such as an area of down-folded rock that has accumulated a thick layer of sediments, or an area scooped out by water erosion.
- To create a concavity or depression in.
“Then axial subsidence basined the surface of the dome.”
“Basining is the process that gives the faces of the dies their radius, or concavity. Depending on the production method, the planchet metal flows either toward or away from the center of the dies. The”
“Of course, this is exactly what did happen—the antiquated practice of basining the dies was cast aside for the Lincoln Cent.”
- To serve as or become a basin.
“To what degree this stress field formed in response to eastward movement of the African plate, to northward movement of the African plate relative to Europe, to basinning of the shelf between the east”
“The eastward pinching and thinning were caused by the rapid basining of the plateau over the Pasco-Richland area in south-central Washington.”
“Walls basined at a ca. 45° angle on the southwest side, but on the west and north there was little basining, with the floor sloping gently up to the original ground surface.”
- To shelter or enclose in a basin.
“A moan as of distant wind or thunder portended something at hand, the approach of which, basinned as we were among high broken ridges, patchy-scrubbed heights, and penned in by a maze of steep-sided g”
“A row of trees was basined in the latter part of April, and by the latter part of July, a little over three months, there was a remarkable improvement in the appearance of the basined row compared wit”
“Caesar's subjects bathed in Caesar's blood basinned in the purple pool of Calpurnia's dream; my sister slept in an ogre's thought and woke up on the hook of a cannibal finger.”
- A census-designated place in Jefferson County, Montana.
- A town, the county seat of Big Horn County, Wyoming.
Formsbasins(plural) · bason(alternative) · basins(present, singular, third-person) · basining(participle, present) · basinning(participle, present, rare) · basined(participle, past) · basined(past) · basinned(participle, past, rare) · basinned(past, rare)