Tarn
name, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A small mountain lake, especially in Northern England. Northern-England
"Thou Wind, that ravest without, / Bare craig, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree, / Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb, / Or lonely house, long held the witches' home, / Methinks were fitter instruments for thee, / Mad Lutanist! [footnote: Tairn is a small lake, generally if not always applied to the lakes up in the mountains, and which are the feeders of those in the valleys.[…]]"
- 2 a mountain lake (especially one formed by glaciers) wordnet
- 3 One of many small mountain lakes or ponds. US
"It [the caribou] makes a fine, bold study on the foreground of an evening scene among the mountain tarns of Northern Idaho, as it fulfils the ideal description of the stag given by [Walter] Scott and other writers."
- 1 A department of Occitania, France. Capital and largest city: Albi (INSEE code 81). error-lua-exec
- 2 A right tributary of the Garonne in southwestern France, flowing through the departments of Lozère, Aveyron, Tarn, Haute-Garonne and Tarn-et-Garonne. error-lua-exec
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"There's a small mountain tarn, surrounded by alpine meadows."
Etymology
From Middle English terne, tarne (“lake; pond, pool”), from Old Norse tjǫrn (“a small lake without tributaries”), from Proto-Germanic *ternō (“water hole”), perhaps related to *turnaz (“bitter, embittered”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *der- (“to separate, split; to crack, shatter”). The word is cognate with Danish tjern, Faroese tjørn (“pond”), Icelandic tjörn (“pond”), Norwegian Bokmål tjern (“small forest or mountain lake”) (Norwegian Nynorsk tjern, tjørn), Swedish tjärn (“small forest lake”).