Word.ws English Dictionary

fossé

fossé noun: a fosse or ditch.

Noun

fossé (plural fossés)

  1. (Scotland, obsolete) A fosse or ditch.
    • —The best engineers call them gazons, Trim, said my uncle Toby.—Whether they are gazons or sods, is not much matter, replied Trim; your Honour knows they are ten times beyond a facing either of brick or stone.——I know they are, Trim in some respects,——quoth my uncle Toby, nodding his head;—for a...1659, Laurence Sterne, chapter XXX, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
    • The Major then went with me and Euphemia (Victoria staying at the inn) and showed us what is called the Ditch, being the fossé and ruinous banks of the old castle […] .1792, James Boswell, in Danziger & Brady (eds.), Boswell: The Great Biographer (Journals 1789–1795), Yale 1989, p. 165

Forms of fossé

pluralfossés

Origin of fossé

From French fossé.

Questions about fossé

What does fossé mean?
Fossé means a fosse or ditch.
What part of speech is fossé?
Fossé is a noun.
What is the plural of fossé?
The plural of fossé is fossés.

Words near fossé in the dictionary

  1. Fossums
  2. fossway
  3. fossways
  4. fossy
  5. fossæ
  6. fossé
  7. fossés
  8. FOSTA
  9. fostamatinib
  10. Fostat
  11. fostemsavir

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fossé (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “fossé.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/foss%C3%A9. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.