Word.ws English Dictionary

resaca

resaca noun: a dry river bed, a former channel of the Rio Grande, found in the southern half of Cameron County, Texas and deep into northeastern portions of the State of Tamaulipas, Mexico.

Noun

resaca (plural resacas)

  1. A dry river bed, a former channel of the Rio Grande, found in the southern half of Cameron County, Texas and deep into northeastern portions of the State of Tamaulipas, Mexico.
    • The road lay over dark resacas and running streams, where volcanic rocks rose above each other^([sic]), and every detour might have been made a fortress.1848, Fayette Robinson, An Account of the Organization of the Army of the United States; with Biographies of Distinguished Officers of All Grades, volume 2, Philadelphia: E. H. Butler, pages 258–9
    • Here and there along the river-bottom, or along the sloughs or “resacas” are found, as Mr. Schwarz has elsewhere stated, “isolated stripes of larger or smaller extent, covered with a dense forest having a thick undergrowth of varied shrubbery and a rich vegetation of lower plants, the like of which...1897 December, H. F. Wickham, “The Coleoptera of the Lower Rio Grande Valley”, in Bulletin From the Laboratories of Natural History of the State University of Iowa, volume 4, number 2, Iowa City, IA...
  2. (Texas) A small body of water.

Examples of resaca in a sentence

  • Here and there along the river-bottom, or along the sloughs or “resacas” are found, as Mr.1897 December, H. F. Wickham, “The Coleoptera of the Lower Rio Grande Valley”, in Bulletin From the Laboratories of Natural History of the...
  • A resaca is an old river channel that was probably cut off by an overflow scouring out a new and more direct course.[1911 January 12, L. L. Hidinger, The Drainage Situation in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas, Circular 103, Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of...
  • At 10 p. m., two miles west of Brownsville, in a resaca, found these frogs in small bushes, in weedy clumps, and even grassy tangles in overflowed tomato field adjoining the overflowed resaca.1933, Anna Allen Wright, Albert Hazen Wright, Handbook of Frogs and Toads: The Frogs and Toads of the United States and Canada (Handbooks...

Forms of resaca

pluralresacas

Origin of resaca

From Spanish resaca, probably from resacar (“retake”), though possibly from rio seco (“dry river”) instead.

Questions about resaca

What does resaca mean?
Resaca means a dry river bed, a former channel of the Rio Grande, found in the southern half of Cameron County, Texas and deep into northeastern portions of the State of Tamaulipas, Mexico.
How do you use resaca in a sentence?
Here and there along the river-bottom, or along the sloughs or “resacas” are found, as Mr.
What part of speech is resaca?
Resaca is a noun.
What is the plural of resaca?
The plural of resaca is resacas.

Words near resaca in the dictionary

  1. res judicata
  2. res judicatae
  3. res nullius
  4. res publica
  5. res.
  6. resaca
  7. resacas
  8. resacetophenone
  9. resacralization
  10. resacralize
  11. resacralized

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: resaca (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “resaca.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/resaca. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.