We pour “liquid” into a container. But what’s the word that should be used in place of “pour” when we are referring to the pouring of a solid substance such as a sugar cube, and not liquid (I am pretty sure “pour” is commonly used for liquids):
He
poured___ sugar cubes into the container.
?
"Pour" can be used with solids, but usually with substances with some visible degree of fluid behavior. This is where it gets a little tricky, because it depends on scale. A small number of sugar cubes doesn't behave like a fluid at small scale. But a truckload of sugar cubes at a larger scale sure does. So it feels right to talk about pouring out a truckload of sugar cubes, but not to pour 3 of them into a teacup.
For that, we might say "put in," "drop in," "dump in" or simply "add."
He likes his tea sweet, so I put 3 sugar cubes into his cup.
Where "pour" won't work because the object of the action is not liquidy (or fluidic) enough, you can use an alternative that describes either the action the actor performs on the container, or the motion the "poured" object takes toward the destination.
Examples:
Some of these are ambiguous as to whether the verb is indicating the actor using a hand or other object to assist with the motion vs. indicating the motion the object took as a result of what the actor did to its container (which in this short form, we are trying not to specify); I suggest those cases which seem ambiguous would either be left ambiguous, replaced with a less ambiguous verb, or expanded/replaced with a compound description of the action to remove the ambiguity, e.g. "With her staff, she shoved and awkwardly rolled the gold ingot out of the tilted wheelbarrow."
