dregs

noun

1. (plural, plural-normally)The sediment settled at the bottom of a liquid; the lees in a container of unfiltered wine.

   “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.”

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

   “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.”

   “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”

2. (figuratively, plural, plural-normally)The worst and lowest part of something.

   “the dregs of society”

   “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.”

   “[…] 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.”