Definitions

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

  • noun An adult female horse or the adult female of other equine species.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A sea; specifically, in astronomy, a name for certain dark regions on the surface of the moon which were supposed by Galileo and other early observers to be seas or oceans, and are now regarded as plains; also a name for certain dark regions on the planet Mars.
  • An obsolete form of more.
  • noun Oppressed sleep; incubus, formerly regarded as an evil spirit of the night that oppresses persons during sleep: now used only in the compound nightmare.
  • noun The female of the horse, or of other species of the genus Equus.
  • noun A few ears of grain left standing and tied together, at which the harvesters throw their sickles till the knot is cut.

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

  • noun The female of the horse and other equine quadrupeds.
  • noun (Med.) Sighing, suffocative panting, intercepted utterance, with a sense of pressure across the chest, occurring during sleep; the incubus; -- obsolete, except in the compound nightmare.

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

  • noun An adult female horse.
  • noun UK, pejorative, slang A foolish woman.
  • noun A type of evil spirit thought to sit on the chest of a sleeping person; also the feeling of suffocation felt during sleep; a nightmare.
  • noun UK, colloquial (Shortening of nightmare) A nightmare; a frustrating or terrible experience.
  • noun planetology A dark, large circular plain; a “sea”.
  • noun planetology On Saturn's moon Titan, a large expanse of what is thought to be liquid hydrocarbons.

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

  • noun female equine animal
  • noun a dark region of considerable extent on the surface of the moon

Etymologies

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

[Middle English, alteration of Old English mȳre (influenced by forms of mearh, horse); see marko- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English mare, mere, from Old English mere, miere ("female horse, mare"), from Proto-Germanic *marhijō (“female horse”), from Proto-Indo-European *mark-, *marḱ- (“horse”). Cognate with Scots mere, meir, mear ("mare"), North Frisian mar ("mare, horse"), West Frisian merje ("mare"), Dutch merrie ("mare"), German Mähre ("mare"), Danish mær ("mare"), Swedish märr ("mare"), Icelandic meri ("mare"). Related also to Old English mearh ("male horse, steed").

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English mare, from Old English mare ("nightmare, monster"), from Proto-Germanic *marōn (“nightmare, incubus”) (compare Dutch (dial.) mare, German (dial.) Mahr, Old Norse mara ( > Danish mare, Swedish mara 'incubus, nightmare')), from Proto-Indo-European *mor- (“feminine evil spirit”). Akin to Old Irish Morrígain 'elf queen', Albanian tmerr ("horror"), Polish zmora 'nightmare', Czech mura 'nightmare, moth'.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin mare ("sea").

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Examples

Comments

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  • a dark region of considerable extent on the surface of the moon; the dark spots we see

    June 18, 2008

  • "Aloha is a tiny impact crater on the Moon, that lies to the northwest of the Montes Agricola ridge, on the Oceanus Procellarum. It is located near the faint terminus of a ray that crosses the mare from the southeast, originating at the crater Glushko."

    December 7, 2016