cirque
Definitions
- A Roman circus.
- A curved depression or natural amphitheatre, especially one in a mountainside at the end of a valley.
- Something in the shape of a circle or ring.
Equivalents
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.
This word is part of the CEFR C2 vocabulary — mastery level.
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