CLOACA • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Cloaca

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

Listen

noun

Cloaca n. (pl. cloacae)

A sewer; as, the Cloaca Maxima of Rome.

A privy.

(Anat.) The common chamber into which the intestinal, urinary, and generative canals discharge in birds, reptiles, amphibians, and many fishes.

See images of 'Cloaca'

Etymology of 'Cloaca'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Cloaca" Quotes from Famous Books

... the islands projected at that hour so distinctly from the river's surface, glanced along the flushed dwellings upon its bank, with their intervals of green terraces, or gazed, in the other direction, upon the Cloaca of Tarquin, Vesta's dome, and the Aventine Hill, with its palaces, convents, vineyards, and gardens, has not felt that the Ponte Rotto was the most suggestive servatory in the Eternal City? The Ponte Molle brings back Constantine ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... done all this. What a well is the human heart, and how giddy it makes one to peer into it! Lo! the cloaca. Of what is it thinking? Of perfume. A prostitute loves a thief through a lily. What plunger into human thought could reach the bottom of this? Who shall fathom this immense yearning for flowers that springs from mud? In the secret self of these hapless ...

— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... monsters, signifying the vomiting forth of sin ejected from the sanctuary; reminding the passer-by who sees them pouring forth the water from the gutter, that when seen outside the church, they are the voidance of the spirit, the cloaca of the soul! ...

— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans