cirque

Noun

cirque (plural cirques)

1. (historical) A Roman circus.
   • 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[…].1722, Laurence Echard, A General Ecclesiastical History from the Nativity of Our Blessed Saviour to the First Establishment of Christianity by Human Laws, under the Emperor Constantine the Great […]...
2. A curved depression or natural amphitheatre, especially one in a mountainside at the end of a valley.
   • 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.1855, Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, in Men and Women, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, published 1856, →OCLC, stanzas 22 and 23, page 102
   • 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.1981, T[homas] Coraghessan Boyle, Water Music, London: Granta Books, published 1998, →ISBN, page 344

   Synonyms:

   corrie, combe, cwm

3. (dated, literary) Something in the shape of a circle or ring.
   • 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...1846, E[dward] Duke, “Stonehenge the Conjoint Temple of Saturn and the Sun”, in The Druidical Temples of the County of Wilts, London: John Russell Smith, 4, Old Compton Street, Soho Square...
   • [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.1899, O[badiah] C[yrus] Auringer, J[eanie] Oliver Smith, “The Temptation”, in The Christ: A Poetical Study of His Life from Advent to Ascension, New York, N.Y.; London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, the...

   Synonyms:

   circle, ring