Ant-bed
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Termite mounds, crushed and watered, used as flooring material. Australia, uncountable, usually
"1912, Fred King, "Born to Floods and Drought" in Marion Houldsworth, ed. Barefoot Through the Bindies, Salisbury, QLD: Boolarong Press, 2012, p. 112, https://books.google.ca/books?id=IEgexYAnkFAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false The meat house had an ant-bed floor and the old blackboy and I dug that ant-bed out, carted it away about fifty yards and shovelled it into a gully. And then we built another ant-bed floor."
Example
More examples"1912, Fred King, "Born to Floods and Drought" in Marion Houldsworth, ed. Barefoot Through the Bindies, Salisbury, QLD: Boolarong Press, 2012, p. 112, https://books.google.ca/books?id=IEgexYAnkFAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false The meat house had an ant-bed floor and the old blackboy and I dug that ant-bed out, carted it away about fifty yards and shovelled it into a gully. And then we built another ant-bed floor."
Etymology
From ant + bed.
Related phrases
More for "ant-bed"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.