cirque

What it means

1. historicalA Roman circus.

   Nero exhibited theſe Spectacles in his own Gardens, impiouſly joining to them the Diverſions of the Cirque, and appearing himſelf publicly in the Habit of a Charioteer, ſitting in his Chariot[…].

   1722, Laurence Echard, A General Ecclesiastical History from the Nativity of Our Blessed Saviour to the First Establishment of Christianity by Human Laws, under the Emperor Constantine the Great […], 6th edition, volume 1, London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC, book 2 (From the Ascension of Our Blessed Saviour, to the Death of St. John, the Last Surviving Apostle), page 347

2. geographyA curved depression or natural amphitheatre, especially one in a mountainside at the end of a valley.

   Only a few lichens and mosses colonize the rocky walls of cirques and nunataks.

   2008, Andrea M. J. Coronato, Fernando Coronato, Elizabeth Mazzoni, Miriam Vásquez, “The Physical Geography of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego”, in J. Rabassa, editor, The Late Cenozoic of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, Elsevier, →ISBN, page 45

   3 more examples

   Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank / Soil to a plash? toads in a poisoned tank, / Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage— / The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.

   1855, Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, in Men and Women, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, published 1856, →OCLC, stanzas 22 and 23, page 102

   Of course it's going to be bad whenever the clouds let loose, but up here pussyfooting along the perimeter of toothy cirques and dead drops of anywhere from eighty to three hundred feet, it would be a disaster.

   1981, T[homas] Coraghessan Boyle, Water Music, London: Granta Books, published 1998, →ISBN, page 344

   When the soldiers were not lost among tattered skeins of fog, they could see far out into the cirque, as if it were a bay of black water.

   1991, Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, →ISBN, page 569

   Synonyms: corrie, combe, cwm

3. datedliterarySomething in the shape of a circle or ring.

   [T]here our camp / Lay pitched that day beneath the sun's wide glare, / Amid the omnipresent desert wastes, / And few men stirred abroad. […] [A]nd the tents / Sagged lifeless all around their dusky cirque, / Whose every rope shone burnished in the glare, / And every tent-pin.

   1899, O[badiah] C[yrus] Auringer, J[eanie] Oliver Smith, “The Temptation”, in The Christ: A Poetical Study of His Life from Advent to Ascension, New York, N.Y.; London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, the Knickerbocker Press, →OCLC, page 36

   1 more example

   Saturn has supplied to the Greeks and Romans the source of a beautiful personification; they have represented him as Time, […] thus with his scythe is he considered to cut down in endless succession every ripened race of man; and as the serpent is annually renewed by the cast of its skin, so is every falling race of man held to be renewed by a young and succeeding progeny; from hence arose the fiction, that Saturn devoured his own children, and hence also is the continuous cirque of imposts at Stonehenge an apt representation of this well imagined emblem.

   1846, E[dward] Duke, “Stonehenge the Conjoint Temple of Saturn and the Sun”, in The Druidical Temples of the County of Wilts, London: John Russell Smith, 4, Old Compton Street, Soho Square; Salisbury, Wiltshire: W. B. Brodie and Co., →OCLC, pages 153–154

   Synonyms: circle, ring

In a sentence

Nero exhibited theſe Spectacles in his own Gardens, impiouſly joining to them the Diverſions of the Cirque, and appearing himſelf publicly in the Habit of a Charioteer, ſitting in his Chariot[…].

1722, Laurence Echard, A General Ecclesiastical History from the Nativity of Our Blessed Saviour to the First Establishment of Christianity by Human Laws, under the Emperor Constantine the Great […], 6th edition, volume 1, London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC, book 2 (From the Ascension of Our Blessed Saviour, to the Death of St. John, the Last Surviving Apostle), page 347

Where it comes from

1. Proto-Indo-European*(s)ker-“to bend; to turn”
2. Ancient Greekκίρκος“circle, ring; racecourse, circus”
3. Latincircus“circle, ring”
4. Frenchcirque“circular arena; cirque”
5. Englishcirque

Borrowed from French cirque (“circular arena; cirque”), from Latin circus (“circle, ring”), from Ancient Greek κίρκος (kírkos, “circle, ring; racecourse, circus”), possibly ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to bend; to turn”). Doublet of circus.