dregs

singular dreg

1. pluralplural normallyThe sediment settled at the bottom of a liquid; the lees in a container of unfiltered wine.

   And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth / Throughout the fluid mass; but downward purged / The black tartareous cold infernal dregs

   1667, John Milton, “Book VII”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC

   3 more examples

   For in the hand of the Lord there is a cup, and the wine is red: it is full of mixture, and he powreth out of the same: but the dregges thereof all the wicked of the earth shall wring them out, and drinke them.

   1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Psalms 75:8

   Yet even now I had not drunk the bitter potion to the dregs; I was not yet persuaded of my loss; I did not yet feel in every pulsation, in every nerve, in every thought, that I remained alone of my race - that I was The Last Man.

   1826, [Mary Shelley], chapter IX, in The Last Man. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC

   The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof, / This is the end of every song man sings! / The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain, / Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain

   c. 1897, Ernest Dowson, Dregs

2. figurativelypluralplural normallythe dregsThe worst and lowest part of something.

   the dregs of society

   3 more examples

   I sat through the dregs of a long hectic evening.

   If at any one time of my life more than another, I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six months of my stay with Mr. Covey.

   1846 [1845], Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Boston: Anti-Slavery Office

   […] he said to himself that in the last hour he had sounded the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs of it, the very bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having always, as long as the two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel.

   1900, Edith Wharton, chapter V, in The Touchstone, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons