Word of the Day:
escarpment
What It Means
A steep descent or declivity; steep face or edge of a ridge; ground about a fortified place, cut away nearly vertically to prevent hostile approach.
Escarpment in Context
“The railway winds down the face of the escarpment on a steady grade of 1.05 per cent, which is considerably better than the old route, up which trains took 2 hr. to struggle 15 miles, with two stops.”
Did You Know?
Borrowed from French escarpement. By surface analysis, escarp + -ment.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: escarpment (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “escarpment.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/escarpment. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.