Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun An accumulation of boulders, stones, or other debris carried and deposited by a glacier.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The accumulations of rock and detrital material along the edges of a glacier.
  • Same as morainic.
  • noun A mixed stony drift gathered from the disintegration of underlying rocks and strewn over lower slopes as by landslides.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Geol.) An accumulation of earth and stones carried forward and deposited by a glacier.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun An accumulation of rocks and debris carried and deposited by a glacier.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun accumulated earth and stones deposited by a glacier

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French, from French dialectal morena, mound of earth, from Provençal morre, muzzle, from Vulgar Latin *murrum.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French moraine, from Savoyard Italian morena, from Franco-Provençal mor, morre ("muzzle, snout"), from Vulgar Latin *murrum. Compare morion.

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Examples

Comments

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  • "... the fires burned through a wild area called Dogtown Common, an expanse of swamp and glacial moraine that was once home to the local crazy and forgotten."

    —Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm, 1997 (NY: HarperCollins, 1999), 18

    August 17, 2009