dipstick survey
n.— «He said agents will even check the amount of gasoline in some fuel storage tanks. “We call it the dipstick survey,” he added.» —“Living Cost Council Opens Nationwide Oil Industry Probe” in Washington, D.C. Los Angeles Times July 11, 1973. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...