drumlin means an elongated hill or ridge of glacial drift. It carries an Arena rating of 1424, earned across 3 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, drumlin ranks #1,094 of 17,149 for Most Exacting Words, #1,917 of 17,127 for Most Vivid Words, #3,306 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words, #3,424 of 17,163 for Funniest Words.
drumlin is pronounced [ˈdɹʌmlɪn].
Why “drumlin” is a great word
An elongated hill or ridge composed of glacial drift, typically shaped by the flow of glacial ice. From Irish *droim* ('back, ridge') plus the English diminutive suffix *-lin* (variant of *-ling*), first attested in English in the 1810s. Unlike an esker, a sinuous deposit of subglacial streams, or a moraine, a scattered heap of glacial debris, a drumlin is the glacier's own sculpted form, a streamlined mound of till molded under its immense, passing weight. It is the whaleback hill rising from a flattened plain, its steeper face pointing mutely toward the vanished glacier's source; it is the egg-shaped mound repeated across a landscape like a stutter in the earth's memory; it is the quiet monument not to ice’s presence, but to its direction and its gone—a small, stubborn testament to the slow violence of things that move too gradually to be witnessed, yet reshape the world entirely.
Etymology
From Irish droim (“back, ridge”) + English diminutive suffix -lin (“variant of -ling”).
noun
- An elongated hill or ridge of glacial drift.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.