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Cirque
Definitions
- 1 A Roman circus. historical
"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[…]."
- 2 a steep-walled semicircular basin in a mountain; may contain a lake wordnet
- 3 A curved depression or natural amphitheatre, especially one in a mountainside at the end of a valley.
"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."
- 4 Something in the shape of a circle or ring. dated, literary
"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.
See also for "cirque"
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Unscramble this word: cirque