Definitions

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

  • noun A woodland.
  • noun An area of open rolling upland.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The name given in England to an oval-shaped area, bounded by a line topographically well marked by an escarpment of the Chalk, which begins at Folkestone Hill, near the Straits of Dover, and passes through the counties of Kent, Surrey, Hants, and Sussex, meeting the sea again at Beachy Head
  • noun Any open country.

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

  • noun A wood or forest; a wooded land or region; also, an open country; -- often used in place names.
  • noun (Geol.) the uppermost member of the Wealden strata. See Wealden.

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

  • noun A wood or forest; a wooded land or region; also, an open country; often used in place names.

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

  • noun an area of open or forested country

Etymologies

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

[From Weald, a once-forested area in southeast England, from Old English wald, weald, forest.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English weald, from Proto-Germanic *walþuz. Compare German Wald, Dutch wout. See also wold, ultimately of the same origin.

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Examples

  • Alighting at the small wayside station, we drove for some miles through the remains of widespread woods, which were once part of that great forest which for so long held the Saxon invaders at bay -- the impenetrable "weald," for sixty years the bulwark of Britain.

    The Adventure of Black Peter. 1990

  • Alighting at the small wayside station, we drove for some miles through the remains of widespread woods, which were once part of that great forest which for so long held the Saxon invaders at bay -- the impenetrable "weald," for sixty years the bulwark of Britain.

    The Return of Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle 1894

  • Wenger protests that his player is innocent of the charges against him, though the fact that Fábregas chooses to wear a vest will lead many to conclude that he is attempting to conceal the boiling weald of the succubus from a vigilant public.

    Why the witch-hunt against Cesc Fábregas gets my goat | Harry Pearson 2011

  • Bronca is generally regarded to be a Latin American phenomenon, yet France's debut novel suggests that the rolling weald of East Sussex harbours its fair share of bronca as well.

    Hill Farm by Miranda France – review 2011

  • It came up over the weald by night with a great wind.

    The Hare And The Tortoise - Lord Dunsany Newmania 2008

  • He enjoyed the quiet rolling countryside of the weald; the pale, late autumn sun, the red and gold of thinning leaves on dark branches, the pools of red and gold below on the wet green turf.

    Poem About Never Growing Up Ryan McDermott 2010

  • Strange how you advocate that Britain should weald "a big stick" but castigate Israel for doing the same.

    On Thursday, the Legg report will be published along with... 2009

  • In weather like this, if my husband were still with me, we would not be trapped in one place, watching a leaden dawn and a sunset of dull red; we would be traveling with the king's court, on progress through the weald and downland of Hampshire and Sussex, the richest and most beautiful countryside in all of England, riding high on the hilly roads and looking out for the first sight of the sea.

    Excerpt: The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory 2006

  • The black and blue marks athwart the weald, which now barely is so stripped, indicate the presence of sylvious beltings.

    Finnegans Wake 2006

  • Soon he got up again and stared for a long time it the sinking world below, at white cliffs to the east and flattening marsh to the left, at a minute wide prospect of weald and downland, at dim towns and harbours and rivers and ribbon-like roads, at ships and ships, decks and foreshortened funnels upon the ever-widening sea, and at the great mono-rail bridge that straddled the Channel from

    The War in the Air Herbert George 2006

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