Definition of "gutter" []

• A channel at the edge of a street or road for carrying off surface water. (noun)
• A trough fixed under or along the eaves for draining rainwater from a roof. Also called regionally eaves spout, eaves trough, rainspout, spouting. (noun)
• A furrow or groove formed by running water. (noun)
• A trough or channel for carrying something off, such as that on either side of a bowling alley. (noun)
• Printing The white space formed by the inner margins of two facing pages, as of a book. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "What else can they do when the gutter is the only way up?"
• "A society based on the shoot-out attitudes of the Wild West where winnners are swaggering kings who rule by intimidation and losers are rotting corpses in the gutter is an unhealthy one indeed, even in a world not bristling with nuclear weapons."
• "In the front housesat any rate in a side-street where the Corporation don’t interferethe women get into the habit of throwing their refuse out of the front door, so that the gutter is always littered with tea-leaves and bread crusts."