cirques

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

   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...

   Synonyms:

   circle, ring