Escarpment
noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 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.
"After the canyons, the most remarkable features of the country are the long lines of cliffs. These are bold escarpments scores or hundreds of miles in length,—great geographic steps, often hundreds or thousands of feet in altitude, presenting steep faces of rock, often vertical."
- 2 a steep artificial slope in front of a fortification wordnet
- 3 a long steep slope or cliff at the edge of a plateau or ridge; usually formed by erosion wordnet
Example
More examples"After the canyons, the most remarkable features of the country are the long lines of cliffs. These are bold escarpments scores or hundreds of miles in length,—great geographic steps, often hundreds or thousands of feet in altitude, presenting steep faces of rock, often vertical."
Etymology
Borrowed from French escarpement. By surface analysis, escarp + -ment.
More for "escarpment"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.