dale
nounnouncommon in dialogue
- //deu//
- //deɪl//
A valley, often in an otherwise hilly area.
noun
- 1
A valley, often in an otherwise hilly area.
And we will all the pleasures prove / That hills and valleys, dales and fields, / Woods, or steepy mountain yields
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion, / Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, / Then reached the caverns measureless to man, / And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: [...]
The country about Nuncombe Putney is perhaps as pretty as any in England. It is beyond the river Teign, between that and Dartmoor, and is so lovely in all its variations of rivers, rivulets, broken ground, hills and dales, old broken, battered, time-worn timber, green knolls, rich pastures, and heathy common, that the wonder is that English lovers of scenery know so little of it.
Over hill, over dale / As we hit the dusty trail, / And those caissons go rolling along.
- 2
The sunken or grooved portion of the surface of a vinyl record.
Etymology
From Middle English dale, from Old English dæl, from Proto-West Germanic *dal, from Proto-Germanic *dalą.
noun
- 1
archaicA trough or spout to carry off water, as from a pump.
The pump-dale scupper is that to which the dale leads, that conveys the water from the pumps to the side on the lower deck of large ships.
Etymology
Related to Low German daal or Dutch daal (“lowers, descends”) and French dalle (“trough; conduit”). Attested in English since the seventeenth century.
Forms
- plural
- dales