Definitions

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

  • noun An ancient grave mound; a barrow.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A sepulchral mound, as the famous Mound of Marathon raised over the bodies of those Athenians who fell in repelling the invading Persians; a barrow; very frequently, a mound covering and inclosing a more or less elaborate structure of masonry.

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

  • noun An artificial hillock, especially one raised over a grave, particularly over the graves of persons buried in ancient times; a barrow.

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

  • noun archaeology A mound of earth, especially one placed over a prehistoric tomb; a barrow.

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

  • noun (archeology) a heap of earth placed over prehistoric tombs

Etymologies

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

[Latin; see teuə- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin tumulus ("mound, hill"), from tumeō ("I swell").

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Examples

Comments

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  • "And as no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall thereby be ushered ..."

    Joyce, Ulysses, 14

    January 20, 2007

  • from Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

    July 19, 2009

  • ". . .a fairly lowly position but which had its own distinction, won by Hassan on account of his polymathic study of an almost unknown tumulus (and nobody who did know it could work out its import) from an oppidum civium romanorum which a scholar from Munich, a Judaist in flight from Austria's Anschluss, had found in diggings at Thugga (or, as it's nowadays known, Dougga)." Gilbert Adair translation of Georges Perec's La Disparition

    August 11, 2010