Emily - from Thesaurus.com
aperture, breach, break, burrow, cave, cavern, cavity, chamber, chasm, chink, cistern, cleft, covert, crack, cranny, crater, cut, den, dent, depression, dimple, dip, excavation, eyelet, fissure, foramen, fracture, gap, gash, gorge, hollow, hovel, keyhole, lacuna, lair, leak, mouth, nest, niche, nick, notch, orifice, outlet, passage, peephole, perforation, pit, pocket, pockmark, puncture, rent, retreat, scoop, shaft, shelter, space, split, tear, tunnel, vacuity, vent, void, window
Ditches? Crevices? Elephant-traps?
Wolfram cheated with the thesaurus. Though I like "divots."
It has to be a man-made excavation. With corners. Essentially, it's something the volume of which one could figure out with high school geometry.
Wolfram cheated with the thesaurus.
Hey! It's not cheating if you cite - it's RESEARCH.
Perhaps some content would help. Brahmagupta's 7th-century astronomical work contains a chapter on arithmetic, one section of which concerns what he calls "excavation" -- he gives rules as to how to find, essentially, the volume of these... excavations. And I want to say, "the section on excavations, which essentially concerns the three-dimensional geometry of... holes in the ground" only without the "holes in the ground" part.
I stand by elephant trap.
