cirque
/sɝk/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 2.96 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
1
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A curved depression or natural amphitheatre, especially one in a mountainside at the end of a valley.
Example Sentences
- "Nero exhibited theſe Spectacles in his own Gardens, impiouſly joining to them the Diverſions of the Cirque, and appearing himſelf publicly in the Habit of a Charioteer, ſitting in his Chariot[…]."
- "Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank / Soil to a plash? toads in a poisoned tank, / Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage— / The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque."
- "Of course it's going to be bad whenever the clouds let loose, but up here pussyfooting along the perimeter of toothy cirques and dead drops of anywhere from eighty to three hundred feet, it would be a disaster."
- "When the soldiers were not lost among tattered skeins of fog, they could see far out into the cirque, as if it were a bay of black water."
- "Only a few lichens and mosses colonize the rocky walls of cirques and nunataks."
- "Saturn has supplied to the Greeks and Romans the source of a beautiful personification; they have represented him as Time, […] thus with his scythe is he considered to cut down in endless succession every ripened race of man; and as the serpent is annually renewed by the cast of its skin, so is every falling race of man held to be renewed by a young and succeeding progeny; from hence arose the fiction, that Saturn devoured his own children, and hence also is the continuous cirque of imposts at Stonehenge an apt representation of this well imagined emblem."
Etymology
Borrowed from French cirque (“circular arena; cirque”), from Latin circus (“circle, ring”), from Ancient Greek κίρκος (kírkos, “circle, ring; racecourse, circus”), possibly ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to bend; to turn”). Doublet of circus.
Origin
- Source language: French
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /sɝk/
- British English: /sɜːk/