dell

plural dells

1. A small, deep, and wooded valley or sunken area of ground, especially in the form of a natural hollow.

   To this day they dwell In a lonely dell.

   1794, William Blake, The Little Girl Found, lines 49-50

   3 more examples

   In dells and dales, conceal'd from human sight.

   1722, Thomas Tickell, Kensington Gardens

   Already the shrill lark is out of sight, Flooding with waves of song this silent dell, ---Ah! there is something more in that bird's flight Than could be tested in a crucible!--- But the air freshens, let us go, why soon The woodmen will be here; how we have lived this night of June![...]

   a. 1881, Oscar Wilde, 'The Garden of Eros', in Poems

   My very photogenic died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

   1955 September 15, Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Paris: The Olympia Press […], →OCLC

   Synonyms: dale, dingle, vale, valley

plural dells

1. obsoleteA young woman; a wench.

   Sweet doxies and dells

   1621 August 13 (first performance; Gregorian calendar), Ben Jonson, “The Masque of the Gypsies”, in Q. Horatius Flaccus: His Art of Poetry. […], London: […] J[ohn] Okes, for John Benson […], published 1640, →OCLC

   1 more example

   A Dell is a yonge wenche, able for generation, and not yet knowen or broken by the vpright man.

   1896, John Stephen Farmer, editor, Musa Pedestris: Three Centuries of Canting Songs and Slang Rhymes (1536-1896), page -11

1. A surname.
2. A number of places in the United States:
   1. A town in Mississippi County, Arkansas.
   2. An unincorporated community in Faribault County, Minnesota.
   3. An unincorporated community in Benton County, Missouri.
   4. A census-designated place in Beaverhead County, Montana.