drainpipe

• drain pipe

drain +‎ pipe

• Audio (Southern England)

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drainpipe (countable and uncountable, plural drainpipes)

1. A pipe that carries fluid which is being drained.
   1. A verticle pipe carrying water from the roof gutter down the side of a building; downspout.
      • 2004, Jan-Andrew Henderson, Secret City, →ISBN, page 65:

        He unlatched the window and stuck his head out — there was a drainpipe a couple of feet to the left but his room was on the second floor and it was too dark to tell whether the garden below was grass, soil, or paving.

      • 2007, Peter Lague, FCS Construction Plumbing L3, →ISBN, page 155:

        We said earlier that we normally use a curved or bent piece of pipe at the top of the drainpipe where it is connected to the gutter, and a fitting at the bottom end of the drainpipe that directs the water into a channel or a drain or gully.

      • 2012, Peter Jinks, Hallam Foe, pages He picked out a sturdy-looking drainpipe leading up to the roof. Without hesitation he descended the few feet of sloping lawn in several short light steps, crossed the gravel with three delicate munches, and placed his right toe on the drainpipe's second bracket.:
      • 2013, David P. Perlmutter, Wrong Place Wrong Time, →ISBN:

        There was a black drainpipe running the entire height of the hotel wall alongside her balcony and I managed to pull myself onto it, gripping the rough, rusty metal as firmly as I could.

   2. A conduit for carrying rainwater or flood water.
      • 1895, The Southwestern Reporter - Volume 28, page 1048:

        Where a lot owner knows that his premises will be flooded in case of a heavy rain, unless a certain city drainpipe in the street adjacent thereto is cleaned out, and gives no notice of it, and makes no effort to remedy the defect, he cannot recover of the city damages caused by flooding his premises during such storm.

      • 2009, Mary Louise DeMott, Mary Rumford, The Adventure of Lisa and the Drainpipe Prayer, →ISBN, page 86:

        She's in a drainpipe--right there," I said, pointing toward the hole in the side of the ditch.

      • 2010, Joe R Lansdale, The Best of Joe R. Lansdale, →ISBN, page 80:

        Her body was found stuffed in a big, ole drainpipe down near the river.

   3. A pipe that carries wastewater from a bathtub, shower, sink, etc.
      • 1999, Peter King, Architectural Ceramics for the Studio Potter, →ISBN:

        First you should know that the size of the drain hole in the bottom of the sink is reflective of the drainpipe's diameter that has been standardized by the plumbing industry.

      • 2012, Caleb Scharf, Gravity's Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos, →ISBN, page 80:

        A crude analogy is to liken this to water draining noisily from a bathtub. As the liquid falls down into the drainpipe, some of its swirling kinetic energy is converted into sound waves, water bashing against molecules of air.

      • 2013, Johnny Zapata, From Sinsemilla to Sins Forgiven: I Chose the Right Path, →ISBN, pages 12–13:

        Since we didn't have a septic tank, we made sure there was an empty bucket underneath the sink. That's where we had a straight drainpipe, and after the dishes were washed, we would take the bucket from underneath the sink and throw waatever was in there outside.

   4. A pipe that is part of a device or appliance for carrying away waste fluid.
      • 1934, Industrial Refrigeration - Volume 86, page 34:

        For years mechanical refrigerator salesmen have delighted in sticking their finger down inside the drainpipe of an ice refrigerator and drawing it out covered with slime, in an effort to demonstrate to the housewife that ice refrigeration is unclean.

      • 1947, Albert Henry Andrews, Manual of oxygen therapy techniques:

        Attach the rubber tubing to the drainpipe of the ice chamber and place the end in a pail.

      • 2014, M L Gambhir, Neha Jamwal, Building and Construction Materials, →ISBN:

        Start the securely anchored centrifuge and slowly increase to the proper speed (2000 – 2500 rpm). Solvent will be rapidly expelled from the drainpipe.

2. (uncountable) The type of pipe that is used to construct a drainpipe.
   • 1979, R. E. D. Bishop, Vibration, →ISBN, page 52:

     Hold a length of drainpipe vertically and stuff a loose wad of metal gauze up into the lower end.

   • 1990, Time-Life Books, Basement and Foundation, →ISBN, page 85:

     . Buy enough unperforated, rigid plastic drainpipe for the job at a building supply center; also buy a 90-degree drainpipe elbow, drainpipe couplings, and any adapter available to join the drainpipe and downspout.

   • 2004, Joel Rogosin, Writing a Life, →ISBN, page 310:

     Tangled in the bushes we found a rusty length of drainpipe; we fastened it to the tree and made a kind of big nest above in the branches and spent a lot of time scrambling up and down the tree into the nest and hollering secret coded messages into the drainpipe to a comrade below.

   • 2012, Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Music At Long Verney, →ISBN:

     It stood upended in the middle of the room, cylindrical as a length of earthenware drainpipe – which, in fact, it was – and gay as a Joseph's coat of many colours.

3. A type of form-fitting trousers with highly tapered legs.
   • 2009, Mim Scala, Diary of a Teddy Boy: A Memoir of the Long Sixties, →ISBN, page 25:

     At the flick of a switch I would change mode and tart up in my new Toby, a horrendous copy of a Savile Row suit, waisted, with a twelve-inch vent at the back, drainpipe trousers and a rose in my buttonhole.

   • 2010, Sue Limb -, Girls, Guilty But Somehow Glorious, →ISBN:

     He was skinny, and wearing drainpipe jeans and a gothic Tshirt with the word 'VOMIT' in silver sparkly letters on black.

   • 2012, Christine Levy, Memoirs of London: From 1960s to Present Day, →ISBN, page 15:

     You also had punks who were again easily identifiable as a group and the members of that group did their best to look different, sporting different uses of hair colour and rips that could occur anywhere in their black drainpipe jeans, army trousers, or in their prolific graffiti'd denim jackets, as well as the hard wearing black leather studded jackets which would sometimes have the famous anarchy symbol and the names of whatever punk bands the individual happened to admire.

• (vertical pipe from roof gutter): downspout, downpipe, leader
• (conduit for rain or flood water): culvert, storm drain
• (pipe from bathtub, sink, etc.): waste pipe
• (type of trousers): stovepipe, skinny jeans

• drainpipe trousers
• like a rat up a drainpipe