means a hole or hollow worn into a road surface, usually by traffic, water, and freezing weather breaking up the pavement

from A literal compound of "pot" and "hole." The "pot" part likely comes from the old word for a deep pit or hollow — the kind that resembled a cauldron or pot dug into the ground. There's a long-running folk story that potters in old England dug into worn road ruts to scavenge clay for their pots, and cart drivers cursed the resulting "pot holes" — charming, but unverified and probably a tidy invention after the fact. More soberly, the term has described natural rounded hollows worn in rock (geologists still use it that way) before settling onto our long-suffering roads.