floodtime

plural floodtimes · alternative flood-time · alternative flood time

1. A time (often an annual season) during which an area is flooded; the season when a river floods its banks.

   In good seasons the stream must have been a fair little river, and during flood time it had spread all over the flat.

   1944, Zane Grey, chapter 28, in The Wilderness Trek

   3 more examples

   Now, on the way, he came to a big, rushing river, which neither he nor his army could cross, for it was flood-time and the water was full of dangerous whirlpools, where nixies and water wraiths lived, always ready to drown men.

   1922, Flora Annie Steel, “Nix Naught Nothing”, in English Fairy Tales, Macmillan, page 180

   The storm that raged in him to-night could not uproot this hatred, the mightiest tree in all John’s country, all that remained to-night, in this, John’s floodtime.

   1953, James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, New York, N.Y.: Knopf, →OCLC, part 2 (The Prayers of the Saints)

   Each year, the river brought its deposit of rich, red silt at floodtime. When the flood receded, the Mohave planted his corn, his squash and beans.

   1959, Theodora Kroeber, The Inland Whale, University of California Press, page 194