barchan
/ˈbɑɹˌkɑn/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.15 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "The sand is usually very well sorted in barchans, for it is constantly re-worked as the dune 'marches'. The marching also causes cross-bedding inside the barchan, with a dip parallel to the sand-fall face."
- "But to follow the dunes around the foot of their slopes is also tedious and one can walk for half a kilometre east or west, finding one barchan linked to another and no easy way through, and the unverifiable suspicion grows that one has been driven by insensible curves actually southwards."
- "The structure out here was revealed immediately—desert punctuated by oases in a geography of cruelty, barkhans or traveling sand-dunes a hundred feet high, which might or might not possess consciousness, […]"
- "Barchans and transverse dunes are essentially of the same type, forming and migrating under a unidirectional wind regime. The difference between the two is related to the amount of sand: barchans are isolated mounds, whereas transverse dunes are composed of many barchans coalesced into a single, longer dune form[…]."
- "Perhaps the most distinctive is the barchan dune, an isolated crescentic form with arms that stretch downwind. Barchans are not huge, often with heights of only a few meters."
Etymology
Unadapted borrowing from Russian барха́н (barxán), from a Turkic language such as Kazakh барқан (barqan); further etymology unknown. The Russian word was first used in scientific literature in 1881 by the Russian zoologist and explorer Alexander von Middendorf (1815–1894).
Word Breakdown
- Root: барқан
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈbɑɹˌkɑn/
- British English: /ˈbɑːk(ə)n/
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
barchanoid
megabarchan