swamp
Noun:
- A wetland area: An area of low-lying, uncultivated ground where water collects; a bog or marsh.
- A difficult or overwhelming situation: A situation or condition that is fraught with difficulties and feels inescapable.
Verb:
- To flood or drench: To fill with water, especially so that it sinks or becomes submerged.
- To overwhelm: To inundate with an excessive amount of something, making it difficult to cope.
Noun:
- The alligators live in the swamp.
- After the merger, the manager found herself in a bureaucratic swamp.
Verb:
- The heavy rains swamped the coastal village.
- The small office was swamped with applications after the job posting.
"to swamp someone/something with something": To overwhelm or burden someone or something with a large quantity of something.
- The company was swamped with complaints about the new policy.
"swamped" (adjective): Overwhelmed, especially with work or responsibilities.
- I can't meet for lunch; I'm completely swamped today.
Swampy (adjective): Characteristic of or resembling a swamp; waterlogged.
- The ground was too swampy to build on.
Swampland (noun): An area of land consisting of swamps.
- They drained the swampland for development.
- Noun (wetland): Bog, marsh, fen, quagmire, mire.
- Noun (situation): Quagmire, morass.
- Verb (flood): Inundate, flood, deluge, submerge.
- Verb (overwhelm): Overwhelm, inundate, besiege, snow under.
(The verb "swamp" is not commonly used in phrasal verb constructions. Its meanings are typically expressed directly or with the preposition "with.")
"Swamp thing": A humorous or derogatory term for a creature or person imagined to come from a swamp, often implying they are uncivilized or strange. (This is a cultural reference, not a standard idiom.)
- He came out of the woods looking like a swamp thing.
"Up a swamp without a paddle": A humorous variation of the idiom "up a creek without a paddle," meaning in a difficult situation with no obvious means of escape or solution.
- If the funding falls through, we'll be up a swamp without a paddle.
- a situation fraught with difficulties and imponderables
- he was trapped in a medical swamp
- low land that is seasonally flooded; has more woody plants than a marsh and better drainage than a bog
- fill quickly beyond capacity; as with a liquid
- the basement was inundated after the storm
- The images flooded his mind
- drench or submerge or be drenched or submerged
- The tsunami swamped every boat in the harbor