combe
A valley, often wooded and often with no river
Noun
- A valley, often wooded and often with no river
- its long, latticed window [...] looked out on a wild spreading view of hill and heather and wooded combe. - 1914, Saki, ‘The Cobweb’, Beasts and Superbeasts:
- gradual rise the shelving combe displayed. - 1805, Robert Southey, “(please specify the page)”, in Madoc, London: […] [F]or Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, and A[rchibald] Constable and Co, […], by James Ballantyne,...
- You wake up next morning on what looks like Salisbury Plain, only here you climb up the side of every combe, round the end and out the other side. - 1950 April, Timothy H. Cobb, “The Kenya-Uganda Railway”, in Railway...
- A cirque.
Origin
From Middle English coumbe, cumbe, from Old English cumb, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *kumbaz; compare Dutch kom (“bowl, basin”), German Kump (“vessel”). Related to Welsh cwm (“a hollow valley”), Ancient Greek κύμβη (kúmbē, “hollow”), Sanskrit कुम्भ (kumbha, “a pot, jug”), etc. through Proto-Indo-European *ḱumbʰ-.