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A spittoon is a container — usually a wide, low metal or pottery bowl, often with a funnel-shaped top — that sits on the floor for people to spit into. It belongs to a particular time and place: from about the 1800s to the early 1900s, chewing tobacco was very common in America and parts of Europe, and chewing it makes you produce a lot of brown that you have to get rid of. So bars, hotels, courtrooms, train stations, even the US Senate had spittoons standing around the floor. Today almost nobody uses one, so when you meet the word it is nearly always in a story, a history book, or a film set in the past — it carries a strong smell of 'old, rough, male, slightly disgusting'. Writers use it on purpose for that feeling. In American English you may also hear the older, plainer word 'cuspidor' for the same thing, and in the past people sometimes just said 'spit box'. There is no modern extended or figurative meaning; the word does one job. Note that the thing was for spitting out tobacco juice, not for being sick into — a bowl for that is a basin or a bucket.
痰盂（吐痰用的痰盂、痰罐；舊時美國多半是吐菸草汁用的）
原始詞典資料1 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。
spittoonnoun/spɪˈtuːn/
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A receptacle for spit (saliva); especially, one used by people using chewing tobacco or snuff.
- In the only arm-chair which the apartment boasted—one of the legs of which was shorter than the other three, and to remedy that defect was ingeniously stuck into an iron spittoon—sat the young man Mr. Pascoe had come to visit, very unlike, it must be confessed, any "portraits of a gentleman" one ever saw in the exhibition of the Royal Academy.
- For use in public institutions, in corridors and grounds, I would recommend an elevated spittoon, which has numerous advantages over the ordinary spittoon placed on the floor.
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。