Word of the Day:
massif
What It Means
A block of the earth's crust bounded by faults or flexures and displaced as a unit without internal change; normally consists of gneisses and schists.
Massif in Context
“The southern borders of these states are keyed to the same horizontal projection, one surveyed by the frontier planter William Byrd in 1728, while the rivers forming their northern extents fall back just opposite each other from the flanks of the Appalachian massif.”
Did You Know?
Borrowed from French massif, from Middle French massif, ultimately from Latin massa, from Ancient Greek μᾶζα (mâza, “barley-cake, lump (of dough)”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: massif (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: “massif.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/massif. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
