glacises

Noun

glacis (plural glacises or glacis)

1. A gentle incline.
   • The foam of these great ruins mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker.1880, Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Old Pacific Canal: The Woods and the Pacific”, in Across the Plains: With Other Memories and Essays, London: Chatto & Windus, […], published 1892, →OCLC, page 79
   1. A gentle sloping landform created by the deposition or erosion of material.
   2. (also, figuratively) A gentle incline in front of a fortification which protects it from cannon fire and exposes attackers to more effective return fire from defenders.
      • I think, quoth Corporal Trim, with humble submission to your Honour’s better judgment,——that these ravelins, bastions, curtins, and hornworks, make but a poor, contemptible, fiddle-faddle piece of work of it here upon paper, compared to what your Honour and I could make of it were we in the country...1659, Laurence Sterne, chapter XXX, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
   3. In full glacis plate: the angled armour plate on the front of a tank which protects it from projectiles; also (often nautical), such a plate protecting an opening (for example, on a ship).
   4. (postal) A device for sorting mail which slides parcels across a sloped surface.

See all 6 meanings of glacis