Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A large mountain mass or compact group of connected mountains forming an independent portion of a range.
- n. A large section or block of the earth's crust that is more rigid than the surrounding rock and has been moved or displaced as a unit.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A central mountain-mass; the dominant part of a range of mountains; a part of a range which appears, from the position of the depressions by which it is more or less isolated, to form an independent whole; also, an orographic block or fault-block (German scholle); a band or zone of rocks raised or depressed between two largely developed parallel faults. The French word massif is occasionally used with these various significations in default of any good and familiar English term, especially by geologists writing on the Alps.
Wiktionary
- n. A principal mountain mass.
- n. A block of the earth's crust bounded by faults or flexures and displaced as a unit without internal change; normally consists of gneisses and schists
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Geol.) A block of the earth's crust bounded by faults and shifted to form peaks of a mountain range.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a block of the earth's crust bounded by faults and shifted to form peaks of a mountain range
Etymologies
- 1885 French, massif, adjective, from Middle French (Wiktionary)
- French, massive, massif, from Old French; see massive. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The massif is the largest Swiss autochthonic crystalline entity.”
“The wreckage of a plane had been found in the fabled Mountains of the Moon, also known as the Rwenzori massif, which is between the two towns and shared by the DRC and Uganda.”
“Towards the northern extremity of the range occur a group of peaks, which together form an oblong block or "massif" amongst the neighbouring ridges known as”
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy"
“But: What was exceptional is that precisely a protruding 'massif' of a hog was dancing in the innersanctum sanctorumof the museum, a great and stupendously rotund animal was actually attempting to, or so it seemed to Wong, preform a pirouette in the manner of one of Degas 'whores.”
Fictionaut: Why is a Hog always Corpulent ? (or Another Special Exhibit at the Met)
“The buildings spread out over the hills which scaled the limestone high massif that dominates the city.”
“Eight people died digging the tunnel a mile-and-a-half below the Gotthard massif.”
“From Samarkand the king struck north to the Jaxartes, like the Oxus a major river running from the great Himalayan massif to the Aral Sea.”
“As golfers approach the 15th hole of the Pevero course, the island of Tavolara, a grey limestone massif, rises up from the horizon.”
“ZURICH — Miners drilling from southern and northern Switzerland are expected Friday to meet hundreds of meters below the Gotthard alpine massif to create the world 's longest railway tunnel as part of an ambitious long-term project to move goods and freight off European roads and onto railroads.”
The Wall Street Journal: Tunnel Meeting Marks Breakthrough for Transalpine Rail Transit
“In Switzerland, miners drilling from southern and northern parts of the country are expected Friday to meet hundreds of meters below the Gotthard alpine massif to create the world 's longest railway tunnel as part of an ambitious long-term project to move goods and freight off European roads and onto railroads.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘massif’.
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colleen's words
yellow, green, pie, blue, fur, people, incense, book, brown, avuncular, mountain, fog and 1316 more...
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the earth
Planetary chaos: terrain, landscape and geology excluding rocks. (See "the geologist" list for the latter.)
butte, karst, caldera, mesa, laccolith, cwm, crater, alp, precipice, sierra, badlands, prairie and 122 more...
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My Treasures
Well everyone's lists are favourites or pets or useful terms, no? These are mine.
mephitic, cagastric, wulm, scaevity, seplasiary, sevidical, sevous, soleated, soloecal, sputcheon, stagma, temerate and 173 more...
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What David Foster Wallace circled in ...
ablative, ablaut, abulia, acephalous, ACTH, adit, adumbrate, agrapha, ailanthus, aleatory, alfresco, algolagnia and 474 more...
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What David Foster Wallace Circled in ...
http://www.slate.com/id/2250784/
ablative absolute, ablaut, abulia, acephalous, ACTH, adit, adumbrate, agrapha, aleatory, ailanthus, alfresco, algolagnia and 482 more...
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5-0
Hecko, words! I’m so happy I’ve found you. I want to keep you all and never want to lose you again. I hope you like it here.
amscray, thistledown, tine, tinsel, pungent, snarl, wail, lanky, viscid, dawdle, luminous, stow and 2719 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 1406 more...
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Clearinghouse
For stuff to simply reside.
calcar, pinion, espadrille, antipodes, peregrine, cormorant, tanager, vireo, farrago, undervest, passerine, oscine and 881 more...
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Skip The Light Fontastic
Fonts whose names are wacky, powerful, intriguing, whimsical, exotic and so on.
buttzilla, consolas, trebuchet, chanticleer, earthpig, dwarves, ciao, ghost town, goodfish, i still know, gorilla milkshake, immoral and 212 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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Speak, Memory
Words gathered while reading Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov.
cracknel, shingly, glaucous, stretcherman, goodish, loden, gutticle, percha, plasticine, instar, wellhole, camera-lucida and 357 more...
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Geology
baraboo, monadnock, peneplain, endrumpf, peneplanation, cairngorm, paleooology, stream capture, allochthon, slickensides, graywacke, tectonics and 56 more...
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Name Suggestions for Even Bigger SUVs...
Watch out, Hummer!
A companion list to Name Suggestions for Ultra-Compact Cars. :-) Sounds best when you preface each word with "the."behemoth, monstrosity, leviathan, goliath, colossus, brute, giant, mammoth, brobdingnagian, jumbo, bulk, elephant and 69 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for massif.
dontcry I loves me some Massif. Jul 25, 2009
chained_bear That must be why I wished it. WordiePRO implants grantable wishes. Jul 24, 2009
bilby See how quickly Wordie makes your dreams come true. Jul 24, 2009
PossibleUnderscore It's pretty nice too. Jul 24, 2009
mollusque It is. Jul 24, 2009
chained_bear I want this to be a type of font. (A font of type?) Jul 24, 2009