steppe

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A vast semiarid grass-covered plain, as found in southeast Europe, Siberia, and central North America.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A more or less level tract devoid of trees: a name given to certain parts of European and Asiatic Russia, of which the most characteristic feature is the absence of forests. The word steppe was introduced into the scientific literature of western Europe by Humboldt, in whose “Ansichten der Natur”—a work widely circulated, and translated into all the most important European languages—there is a chapter entitled “Steppen und Wusten” (Steppes and Deserts). The steppe region in Europe begins on the borders of Holland, and extends through northern Germany—where such lands are called Heiden (heaths)—into Russia in Europe, and beyond the Ural Mountains almost to the Pacific Ocean, for a distance of about 4,500 miles. Although the steppes are in general characterized by the lack of an arboreal and the presence of a grassy vegetation, and by a pretty uniformly level surface, there are many breaks in this botanical and topographical monotony, in the form of forests extending along the streams, large patches of dense and sometimes tall shrubbery, lakes (both fresh and saline), rolling hills, ridges, barren sands, and patches covered with saline efflorescence. The general character of the region is pastoral, and the population (especially of the Asiatic steppes) nomadic: but all this has been to a considerable extent interfered with by the spread of Russian civilization and the domination of Russian authority. The Russian and Siberian steppes pass southward into the deserts of central Asia, and northward into the tundra region of the extreme north. Humboldt, in the work named above, occasionally uses the term steppe in describing the pampas and llanos of South America, and the plains, prairies, and barrens of the northern division of the New World, and his example has been followed to a certain extent by other physical geographers writing in regard to America; but the word steppe is nowhere in popular use except as to places where Russian is the dominating language.
2. n. In phytogeography, xerophilous grassland. This formation as met, with at high elevations is distinguished as alpine steppe.

Wiktionary

1. n. The grasslands of Eastern Europe and Asia. Similar to (US) prairie and (African) savannah.
2. n. More properly, the name given vast cold, dry grass-plains.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. One of the vast plains in Southeastern Europe and in Asia, generally elevated, and free from wood, analogous to many of the prairies in Western North America. See savanna.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. extensive plain without trees (associated with eastern Russia and Siberia)