HomeServicesBlogDictionariesContactSpanish Course
Back to search

cirque

Noun CEFR C2 Specialized
sɜːk

Definitions

  1. A Roman circus.
  2. A curved depression or natural amphitheatre, especially one in a mountainside at the end of a valley.
  3. Something in the shape of a circle or ring.

Equivalents

FrançaisCirque
DeutschKar
Portuguêscirco
25 more languages
Azərbaycan dilikar
Bosanskikara
Catalàcirc
Češtinakar
Cymraegpeiran
Ελληνικάλεκανοπέδιο
Esperantocirko
Euskarazirku
Suomionsilo
Gaeilgecoire
Gàidhligcoire
Hrvatskikara
Հայերենկար
日本語圏谷
ქართულიკარი
Қазақ тіліқар
한국어카르
Lietuviųkarą
Nederlandsketeldal
Русскийкарцирк
Српскиkara
Українськакарцирк

Examples

Nero exhibited theſe Spectacles in his own Gardens, impiouſly joining to them the Diverſions of the Cirque, and appearing himſelf publicly in the Habit of a Charioteer, ſitting in his Chariot[…].”
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank / Soil to a plash? toads in a poisoned tank, / Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage— / The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.”
“Of course it's going to be bad whenever the clouds let loose, but up here pussyfooting along the perimeter of toothy cirques and dead drops of anywhere from eighty to three hundred feet, it would be a disaster.”
When the soldiers were not lost among tattered skeins of fog, they could see far out into the cirque, as if it were a bay of black water.”
Only a few lichens and mosses colonize the rocky walls of cirques and nunataks.”
Saturn has supplied to the Greeks and Romans the source of a beautiful personification; they have represented him as Time, […] thus with his scythe is he considered to cut down in endless succession every ripened race of man; and as the serpent is annually renewed by the cast of its skin, so is every falling race of man held to be renewed by a young and succeeding progeny; from hence arose the fiction, that Saturn devoured his own children, and hence also is the continuous cirque of imposts at Stonehenge an apt representation of this well imagined emblem.”
“[T]here our camp / Lay pitched that day beneath the sun's wide glare, / Amid the omnipresent desert wastes, / And few men stirred abroad. […] [A]nd the tents / Sagged lifeless all around their dusky cirque, / Whose every rope shone burnished in the glare, / And every tent-pin.”

CEFR level

C2
Mastery
This word is part of the CEFR C2 vocabulary — mastery level.
See all C2 English words →

See also

Learn this word in context

See cirque used in real conversations inside our free language course.

Start Free Course

Know this word better than we do? Language is a living thing — help us keep it growing. Collaborate with Babel Free