from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun A pass between two mountain peaks or a gap in a ridge.
from The Century Dictionary.
noun An abbreviation of Colonel as a title, and
noun of Colossians.
noun [lowercase] An apothecaries' abbreviation of coliander, an obsolete form of coriander.
noun The assimilated form of com-, con-, before l. See com-, con-.
noun A name given by Abercrom by in 1887 to the region on a weather-map between two anticyclones, where the isobars show a connecting neck or narrow region of lower pressure analogous to the col that affords a passage from one mountain peak to its neighbor: not to be confounded with a trough or an area of low pressure.
noun A narrow pass between two mountain peaks: a term used in English by some writers on alpine geology and mountaineering.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
noun A short ridge connecting two higher elevations or mountains; the pass over such a ridge.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun A dip between mountain peaks in a summit-line.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
noun a pass between mountain peaks
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[French, from Old French, neck, from Latin collum; see kwel- in Indo-European roots.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
From French col, from Latin collum ("neck").
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Examples
I remember being up late one night as I was packing up my dorm room after my junior year in college, when the infomercial for Nads came on the TV.
I know a happily married, very domestic, couple of whom the wife first thought perhaps the husband liked her when he held her hair back while she was throwing up in college.
(He claims it was misinterpreted by the evil Clinton administration, and was only supposed to apply to students so convicted while in college.
(He claims it was misinterpreted by the evil Clinton administration, and was only supposed to apply to students so convicted while in college.
Pope John Paul II was widely beloved, and I think you’d find many who’d describe him as the epitome of wise moral leadership, but then you can’t really overlook that thin collective that considers him one of the 20th Century’s worst moral tyrants, canyou?
When I was in college, I used to love these two recordings by a University of Pennsylvania a cappella group — one was a cover of “Baby” by Nil Lara, the other a cover of Stevie Wonder’s version of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.”
hernesheir commented on the word col
From American Heritage Dictionary: "A pass between two mountain peaks or a gap in a ridge."
Cf. saddle point.
September 28, 2009