marais

plural maraises

1. A marsh; a marshy area, one intermittently covered with water, particularly in Louisiana, or in other French-speaking areas.

   […] unexpected eyes the color of lilac-blue water orchids, or of maraises under a blue sky, those sudden, clear, circular ponds in the short-turfed flatlands of the Louisiana prairie.

   1992, Alison McLeay, Sea Change: A Novel

   5 more examples

   […] and as all along the sea-coast, at least in those parts where I have resided, there has always been a vast extent of marais, or marsh, which has been bien communal, the poorer classes experienced no obstacle to their living in this manner. And no porte d'arme is required.

   1855, Christopher Idle (pseudonym), Hints on shooting and fishing, page 97

   […] and when rains filled the maraises, and the cold nor'westers blew from Texas and the sod was spongy with much water, and he went out for feathered game, the numberless mallards, black ducks, gray ducks, teal - […]

   1888, George Washington Cable, Bonaventure: A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana, page 66

   First of all, on the East, in that part of the Town which still takes its name from the marais or marsh in which Camulogenes entangled Cæsar, there was a collection of palaces, the mass of which extended to the waterside.

   1891, Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame, page 143

   Fencing in a "marais" [marsh] on the prairie, they raised "providence rice," depending on providential rainfall to water the crops. The Acadians raised only a fraction of Louisiana's rice crop, but they pioneered an ideal environment for rice growing. The fertile prairie loams overlay a subsoil[…]

   1994 April 30, John Otto, Southern Agriculture During the Civil War Era, 1860-1880, Praeger, page 93

   Boiling water was also used […] for crawfish, which were harvested in maraises (swampy or floodprone areas) on meatless Lenten days. Also boiled, usually in gumbos, were saltwater shellfish caught during coastal hunting and fishing forays by Acadian farmers from the lower prairies[…]

   1992, Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People, 1803-1877, Univ. Press of Mississippi, →ISBN, page 23

1. pluralplural of marai

1. A historical district in Paris, France.