ˈhard-pan orig. U.S.
[See pan.]
1. A firm subsoil of clayey, sandy, or gravelly detritus; also, hard unbroken ground.
| 1817 T. Dwight Trav. New Eng. (1821) I. 374 What is here called hard pan, a very stiff loam, so closely combined, as wholly to prevent the water from passing through it. 1828 Webster, Pan, among farmers, the hard stratum of earth that lies below the soil; called the hard pan. 1829 H. Murray N. Amer. II. iii. i. 273 The farmer comes to what Mr. Spafford calls hard-pan, a stiff impenetrable surface on which no vegetable substance will grow. 1883 Century Mag. Nov. 113 The New [World] is for the most part yet raw, undigested hard-pan. 1886 Marquis of Lorne in Gd. Words 166 Large quantities of loose rock and hardpan. 1963 D. W. & E. E. Humphries tr. Termier's Erosion & Sedimentation 406 Hardpan, an English agricultural term (used mainly in the U.S.A., Africa and Australia) for a horizon in podsolic and lateritic soils hardened by precipitation and cementation. 1968 New Scientist 10 Oct. 79/3 The number of rice paddies under cultivation in some Far Eastern countries could be doubled using an asphalt ‘hardpan’. |
2. fig. Lowest level or foundation; bottom; ‘bed-rock’.
| 1852 W. B. Pike in N. Hawthorne & Wife (1885) I. 444 Almost all the novel-writers I have read, although truthful to nature, go through only some of the strata; but you are the only one who breaks through the hard-pan. 1860 Holmes Elsie V. viii, Mr. Silas Peckham had gone a little deeper than he meant, and come upon the ‘hard-pan’, as the well-diggers call it, of the Colonel's character. 1872 B. Talbot in Amer. Ann. Deaf July 135 Down in the very hard-pan of ignorance..must the workman prepare a bed for this foundation. 1883 H. A. Beers in Century Mag. June 285/2 But it [a book] didn't appear to get down to hard-pan or to take a firm grip on life. |
3. attrib. and Comb.
| 1870 J. K. Medbery Men & Myst. Wall St. 212 Hard pan is soon reached, and both old world and new are full of hard-pan capitalists. 1889 K. Munroe Golden Days xi. 122 To tell the honest hard-pan truth. 1907 R. W. Service Songs of Sourdough (1908) 77 When a man gits on his uppers in a hard-pan sort of town. 1928 Bull. Amer. Soil Survey Assoc. IX. 33 Immaturely developed soils may have a hardpan-like horizon. |