Word.ws English Dictionary

marais

marais noun: a marsh; a marshy area, one intermittently covered with water, particularly in Louisiana, or in other French-speaking areas. Also the plural of marai.

Noun

marais (plural maraises)

  1. A marsh; a marshy area, one intermittently covered with water, particularly in Louisiana, or in other French-speaking areas.
    • […] and as all along the sea-coast, at least in those parts where I have resided, there has always been a vast extent of marais, or marsh, which has been bien communal, the poorer classes experienced no obstacle to their living in this manner. And no porte d'arme is required.1855, Christopher Idle (pseudonym), Hints on shooting and fishing, page 97
    • […] and when rains filled the maraises, and the cold nor'westers blew from Texas and the sod was spongy with much water, and he went out for feathered game, the numberless mallards, black ducks, gray ducks, teal - […]1888, George Washington Cable, Bonaventure: A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana, page 66

Proper noun capitalized: Marais

the Marais

  1. A historical district in Paris, France.

Also used as

marais is also the plural of marai.

Examples of marais in a sentence

  • Fencing in a "marais" [marsh] on the prairie, they raised "providence rice," depending on providential rainfall to water the crops.1994 April 30, John Otto, Southern Agriculture During the Civil War Era, 1860-1880, Praeger, page 93:
  • […] unexpected eyes the color of lilac-blue water orchids, or of maraises under a blue sky, those sudden, clear, circular ponds in the short-turfed flatlands of the Louisiana prairie.1992, Alison McLeay, Sea Change: A Novel:
  • Boiling water was also used […] for crawfish, which were harvested in maraises (swampy or floodprone areas) on meatless Lenten days.1992, Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People, 1803-1877, Univ. Press of Mississippi, →ISBN, page 23:

Forms of marais

pluralmaraises

Origin of marais

Borrowed from French marais (and in Louisiana, Louisiana French marais).

From French Marais.

Phrases with marais

Questions about marais

What does marais mean?
Marais means a marsh; a marshy area, one intermittently covered with water, particularly in Louisiana, or in other French-speaking areas.
How do you use marais in a sentence?
Fencing in a "marais" [marsh] on the prairie, they raised "providence rice," depending on providential rainfall to water the crops.
What part of speech is marais?
Marais can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of marais?
The plural of marais is maraises.

Words near marais in the dictionary

  1. Maragongdong
  2. marah
  3. marahs
  4. Marahuan
  5. marai
  6. marais
  7. Marais des Cygnes
  8. maraises
  9. Maraj
  10. Marajs
  11. marajuana

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: marais (page history and authors); Marais (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: “marais.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/marais. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.