pissdale

English

Alternative forms

• piss-dale, piss dale

Etymology

piss +‎ dale

Noun

pissdale (plural pissdales)

1. (now chiefly historical) A urinal basin or trough (usually metal) on a ship.
   • 1991, Joe J. Simmons, Those Vulgar Tubes: External Sanitary Accommodations Aboard European Ships of the Fifteenth Through Seventeenth Centuries, Nautical Archaeology Program, page 55:

     […] pissdales on unidentified models in the collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, are known to exist. Two of these, one of a fifty-gun ship of ca. 1720 and another of the same size from ca. 1725, have paired pissdales, one on each side of the forward jeer capstan.

   • 2019 October 29, Peter FitzSimons, James Cook: The story behind the man who mapped the world, Hachette Australia, →ISBN:

     […] while there by the stairs leading to the quarter-deck is the copper bowl known as the 'pissdale', where officers could relieve themselves. All of them, Cook insists, even the pissdale, must be polished till they shine – ship-shape – as brightly as the brass buckles and buttons on the officers' uniforms. With no little […]