Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A gentle slope; an incline.
- n. A slope extending down from a fortification.
- n. A neutral area separating conflicting forces.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A gentle slope or sloping bank. In fort., a sloping bank so raised as to bring the enemy advancing over it into the most direct line of fire from the fort; that mass of earth which serves as a parapet to the covered way having an easy slope or declivity toward the champaign or field.
- n. An easy slope, like that of the shingle piled on the shore by the action of the tides and waves, less steep than a talus.
Wiktionary
- n. military A gentle incline in front of a fortification.
- n. military The angled armour plate on the front of a tank; glacis plate.
- n. postal service A device for sorting mail which slides parcels across a sloped surface.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A gentle slope, or a smooth, gently sloping bank; especially (Fort.), that slope of earth which inclines from the covered way toward the exterior ground or country (see
Illust. of ravelin).
Etymologies
- French, from Old French, from glacer, to slide, from glace, ice, from Vulgar Latin *glacia, from Latin glaciēs; see gel- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The glacis is the smooth ground outside the ditch.”
“Thus the ground beyond the ditch, that is, the glacis, covers the walls from the shot of a besieger, and renders it extremely difficult to reach them.”
“The purpose of the glacis, which is an inclined plane, is to expose an attacking party to the fire of the guns, which are so placed as to sweep it from the crest of the counterscarp to the edge of the beach.”
“At the base is a kind of glacis, which runs up at an angle of forty-five from the plain to within fifty, and, in some places, within twenty feet of the foot of the wall.”
“This crusts over the whole glacis of the eastern and northern parts of the piedmont giving very poor soils, usually skeletal lithosols if present at all.”
“It rises abruptly 1,000 m above an almost flat surrounding glacis.”
“Again there was no moat, just a glacis, so that they had to mount a kind of stone hill leading up to the wall.”
“The Germans labored up the glacis slowly at the most exposed places; now crawling on their bellies, now creeping on hands and knees, but, in the main, moving with erect and steady bearing.”
Fictionaut: She Makes Her Mouth Small & Round & Other Stories
“The landscape is characterized by volcanic piles with precipitous slopes, and deeply incised valleys (glacis slopes).”
“The inner walls of the Crac are ringed by a smooth slope called a glacis.”
The Wall Street Journal: A Medieval Castle in the Middle East
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘glacis’.
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defense
shield, aegis, armor, cuirass, plastron, inured, reinforced, cataphract, proof, targus, buckler, shield bearer and 123 more...
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250 More Spelling Words
More words for intermediate and advanced spellers.
melisma, dioecious, jejunity, sialogogue, zingiber, zendik, dithyramb, pneuma, kachina, agiotage, baedeker, sabulous and 238 more...
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Interesting words
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
concupiscence, brize, scree, scoria, forestaff, spanaemia, valetudinarianism, distasture, pyrethrum, laudanum, gentian, bicameral and 11184 more...
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phrontistery - g
from phrontistery.info
gabardine, gabbart, gabble, gabbro, gabelle, gabion, gablock, gad, gadarene, gadoid, gadroon, gadzookery and 439 more...
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Verecund, flivver, etc
Just some words I happen to enjoy. Some thread-worn, some not.
yegg, yob, verecund, amatory, fermata, threepenny, gruntled, flivver, gamboge, decolletage, ordure, nudnik and 173 more...
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Pale Fire
Words gathered while reading Pale Fire.
larches, torquate, stillicide, vermiculate, preterist, theolatry, iridule, vulgarian, cloutish, lemniscate, torsion, trillium and 176 more...
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summer words 2009
how many words can I make mine this summer?
largess, hoyden, catholic, fornicatress, quean, slattern, bildungsroman, sybaritic, descresent, nodus, frittle, callipygian and 529 more...
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Castles and Keeps
Shamelessly ripped off from this site and others (to be named hereinafter). (Fair warning: for my own edification, I may add definitions/comments from the site, but you might want to just go there ...
abutment, adulterine, allure, angle-spur, apse, arbalest, arbalestier, arbalist, arcade, arch, armoury, arrow slit and 410 more...
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Landscape
riparian, littoral, talus, fen, ambit, savanna, remnant prairie, shortgrass prairie, tallgrass prairie, marsh, swamp, marshy and 199 more...
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looked up
Words I've come across while reading and looked up in the dictionary.
deesis, pendentive, revetment, aedicule, stemma, patera, ephod, entrepot, corbel, exedra, volute, archivolt and 1408 more...
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Lay of the Land
all kinds of scapes
steppe, veld, veldt, campo, llano, taiga, krummholz, elfinwood, tundra, sward, lea, heath and 197 more...
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Words I should know
Words found in vocabulary lists that I don't really know or haven't heard before. Removed when I see them in a sentence somewhere. Moved to "Words I've learned just now" if I didn't recognize it ...
moiety, abrogate, abstemious, acumen, bowdlerize, enervate, expurgate, gauche, hegemony, inculcate, jejune, quasar and 45 more...
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Fortification
bastion, ravelin, demilune, scarp, counterscarp, covert way, salient, hornwork, crownwork, citadel, merlon, embrasure and 15 more...
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mgoormastic's list
Interesting words used in The Three Musketeers by Dumas.
baldric, auberge, mercer, calotte, apologue, parblue, ma foi, mordieu, ventrebleu, capon, diffident, ingenuous and 58 more...
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Lowry
nutant, meed, donga, mephitic, punk, caliginous, cauchemar, horripilation, hyacinthine, corposant, counterscarp, garboon and 65 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for glacis.
knitandpurl "The Dwelling seemed to be a sort of town of rounded buildings more like lime-kilns than anything else, with arched doors leading to dark insides. They were all built of tiny stones, such as lay on the beach. Beyond the huts or houses towered the castle, a vast rough structure with towers and arches and buttresses and bastions and glacis and bridges and a great moat all around it."
The Magic City by E. Nesbit, p 119 of the SeaStar Books paperback Oct 30, 2010
yarb Citation on counterscarp. Jul 30, 2008