Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun plural Barren land characterized by roughly eroded ridges, peaks, and mesas.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- Barren regions, especially in the western United States, where horizontal strata (Tertiary deposits) have been often eroded into fantastic forms, and much intersected by cañons, and where lack of wood, water, and forage increases the difficulty of traversing the country, whence the name, first given by the Canadian French, Mauvaises Terres (bad lands).
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun geomorphology An
arid terrain characterized by severe erosion of sedimentary rocks.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun an eroded and barren region in southwestern South Dakota and northwestern Nebraska
- noun an eroded and barren region in southwestern South Dakota and northwestern Nebraska
- noun deeply eroded barren land
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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On the wall next to the door, instead of a nameplate, there was an ink and pen drawing, two inches by three inches, of a small piece of the U.S. map, with the word badlands written in the middle.
The Dead House Linda Fairstein 2001
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Known as the badlands because of their barrenness, the small rolling hills around the ranch were composed of disintegrating sandy silts and clay shales.
Portrait of An Artist Laurie Lisle 1986
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As I sit here in my luckily obtained front row seat, I am blown away by scenes of Vash's trademark shinanagens with the accompanying crew of Milly, Meryl and Nick Wolfwood in what is appropriately called a badlands rumble.
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Humans cleared the land of its natural vegetation and the badlands are the result.
blogTO 2010
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As I sit here in my luckily obtained front row seat, I am blown away by scenes of Vash's trademark shinanagens with the accompanying crew of Milly, Meryl and Nick Wolfwood in what is appropriately called a badlands rumble.
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A little below Afghanistan lies Pakistan's tribal zones, the so-called badlands of Pakistan, a sovereign country that has just given the boot to Pervez Musharraf, a military strongman and president once considered friendly to US interests.
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Does that mean we simply have to allow terrorists to operate there, in kind of badlands, where they can plan, they can set up laboratories, they can experiment with chemical weapons and with biological weapons?
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Does that mean we simply have to allow terrorists to operate there, in kind of badlands, where they can plan, they can set up laboratories, they can experiment with chemical weapons and with biological weapons?
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Does that mean we simply have to allow terrorists to operate there, in kind of badlands, where they can plan, they can set up laboratories, they can experiment with chemical weapons and with biological weapons?
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The black-tailed prairie dogs that live in South Dakota's "badlands" are those under the greatest threat and controversy.
Creatiary 2009
bilby commented on the word badlands
"Why, then, has the U.S. decided to destabilize a crucial ally? Within Pakistan, some analysts argue that this is a carefully coordinated move to weaken the Pakistani state yet further by creating a crisis that extends way beyond the badlands on the frontier with Afghanistan. Its ultimate aim, they claim, would be the extraction of the Pakistani military's nuclear fangs. If this were the case, it would imply that Washington was indeed determined to break up the Pakistani state, since the country would very simply not survive a disaster on that scale."
- Tariq Ali, 'The American War Moves to Pakistan', 16 Sep 2008.
September 17, 2008