adit

plural adits

1. businessA horizontal or nearly horizontal passage from the surface into a mine, as contrasted with a shaft or vertical entry passage, used for ventilation, haulage, drainage, or other purposes.

   The Old Mine is currently entered through an upper adit as the main is no longer accessible.

   2006, Mike Hetman, “Old Mine”, in IronMiners.com, archived from the original on 19 Aug 2006

   4 more examples

   A narrow and untrodden cavern at the bottom connects it with the outer sea; they could even then hear the mysterious thunder and gurgle of the surge in the subterranean adit, as it rolled huge boulders to and fro in darkness, and forced before it gusts of pent-up air.

   1855, Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho!: Or, The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Macmillan & Co., →OCLC

   What all these passages are, of course I cannot say, but we thought that they must be the ancient workings of a mine, of which the various shafts and adits travelled hither and thither as the ore led them.

   1885 September, H[enry] Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, London; Paris: Cassell & Company, […], published 1887, →OCLC

   It consisted of an opening in the forest which clothed the hillside with the black mouth of an adit in the midst of it, and a few big mounds of debris, beside which stood a rude log shanty.

   1910 May, Harold Bindloss, The Gold Trail, Toronto, Ont.: McLeod & Allen, page 127

   The adit sloped downwards into the bowels of some long-fallen building, following a passage that had silted up when the city had first been buried.

   2008, Iain M. Banks, Matter, page 445

   Synonyms: tunnel

1. A diminutive of the male given name Aditya, from Sanskrit.