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A midden is a heap of waste: animal dung, old food, shells, broken pots — the stuff people and animals throw away. On an old farm it was the dunghill by the yard. care about middens because a pile of old rubbish can tell you what people ate and how they lived; a shell midden is a heap of leftover shells by the sea. Though actually, in some parts of Britain, especially the north, calling a room “a midden” just means it is filthy and messy, not that there is a real dung heap in it. It is an old word, a bit or dialect; most will meet it in history or archaeology, not in daily chat.
糞堆；垃圾堆（考古上常指貝塚、廚餘堆）
組成From Middle English midding, myddyng, from Old Danish mykdyngja, a compound of Old Norse myk, myki (“muck, manure”) and dyngja (“dung, dungpile”). Cousins include Danish mødding and Norwegian mødding.
同家族的字
- muckboth go back to Old Norse myk / myki, manure
原始詞典資料5 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
middennoun/ˈmɪdən/
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A dung heap.
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A refuse heap usually near a dwelling.
- Untouched by the decaying middens in which they live, they emerge into the sunshine immaculate and serene. The Burmese must be the best-dressed people in the world.
- Strange rubbish, not the tins and paper and boxes and other containers you would expect in a town, but a finer kind of waste […] that made the middens look like grey-black mounds of sifted earth.
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archaeologyhistoryhuman-sciencesAn accumulation, deposit, or soil derived from occupation debris, rubbish, or other by-products of human activity, such as bone, shell, ash, or decayed organic materials; or a pile or mound of such materials, often prehistoric.
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biologynatural-scienceszoologyA shelter made of vegetation and other materials by packrats.
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biologynatural-scienceszoologyAn accumulation of dried urine and fecal deposits made by hyraxes.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。