Expanse

//ɪkˈspæns// noun

noun ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A wide stretch, usually of sea, sky, or land.

    "That large room had always awed Ivor: even as a child he had never wanted to play in it, for all that it was so limitless, the parquet floor so vast and shiny and unencumbered, the windows so wide and light with the fairy expanse of Kensington Gardens."

  2. 2
    a wide scope wordnet
  3. 3
    An amount of spread or stretch.
  4. 4
    the extent of a 2-dimensional surface enclosed within a boundary wordnet
  5. 5
    a wide and open space or area as of surface or land or sky wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
areasweepacreageamountamplenessamplitude

Example

More examples

"Soon, the expanse of the galaxy became reminiscent of ancient Polynesian migrational waves throughout the Pacific Ocean."

Etymology

From Latin expansum, from expandō.

Related phrases

large areawide areawide something

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.