# a bottomless pit

idiom · CEFR C1

Source: https://englishreference.com/idiom/bottomless-pit
Updated: 2026-07-29

## Meaning

Something that consumes endlessly and can never be filled or satisfied.

## Examples

- That old house is a bottomless pit for money.
- The failing project became a bottomless pit, absorbing every extra pound the board threw at it without ever showing a return.
- Grief, he discovered, could be a bottomless pit, and no amount of work, distraction, or well-meaning company seemed able to fill the space the loss had opened up in him.

## Origin

The bottomless pit is imagery from the apocalyptic vision of Revelation. In chapter 9, verses 1 and 2, a star falls and is given the key to the shaft of the abyss, which opens to release smoke and locusts — the text's picture of a fathomless underworld from which torment rises. The King James rendering bottomless pit fixed the phrase in English, and its literal impossibility — a hole with no floor — is exactly what made it useful as a metaphor. Detached from prophecy, a bottomless pit is now anything that swallows whatever you put in and demands more: an insatiable appetite, an endlessly loss-making venture, a need that no amount of money or effort can ever fill.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.