| Library / English Dictionary |
CLIFF
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A steep high face of rock
Example:
a steep drop
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Nouns denoting natural objects (not man-made)
Hypernyms ("cliff" is a kind of...):
formation; geological formation ((geology) the geological features of the earth)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "cliff"):
crag (a steep rugged rock or cliff)
precipice (a very steep cliff)
Context examples:
When these ice shelves collapse into the sea, they expose towering cliffs of ice along Antarctica's edge.
(Antarctic ice cliffs may not contribute to ice-sheet instability as much as predicted, National Science Foundation)
This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
It was a vast slide that broke the straight wall of a cliff, and was overrun with brush and creeping plants, where a score of tribes could have lain well hidden.
(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)
It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the South, like a flock of glorious passenger birds, and lighted to rest them on the cliffs of Albion.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
It was on a clear morning, in the latter days of December, that I first saw the white cliffs of Britain.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
He felt a vacancy in him, a need for the hush and quietude of the stream and the cave in the cliff.
(White Fang, by Jack London)
The latter and I would have gone out to fly the great kite; but that I had still no other clothes than the anything but ornamental garments with which I had been decorated on the first day, and which confined me to the house, except for an hour after dark, when my aunt, for my health's sake, paraded me up and down on the cliff outside, before going to bed.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more, its sweet, retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands, make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme; and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and orchards of luxuriant growth, declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight: these places must be visited, and visited again, to make the worth of Lyme understood.
(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)
In August 2014, Eric Rignot, a glaciologist working at the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, led a team in mapping ice cliffs at the front edges of three outlet glaciers in Greenland.
(The Hidden Meltdown of Greenland, NASA)
He would be away, in the South Seas, building his grass house, trading for pearls and copra, jumping reefs in frail outriggers, catching sharks and bonitas, hunting wild goats among the cliffs of the valley that lay next to the valley of Taiohae.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
