Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A huge mass of ice slowly flowing over a landmass, formed from compacted snow in an area where snow accumulation has exceeded melting and sublimation.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A vessel for holding ice and cooling wine.
  • noun The form in which the snow, falling on the higher parts of those mountain-ranges which are above the snow-line, finds its way down into the valleys.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun An immense field or stream of ice, formed in the region of perpetual snow, and moving slowly down a mountain slope or valley, as in the Alps, or over an extended area, as in Greenland.
  • noun (Geol.) the theory that large parts of the frigid and temperate zones were covered with ice during the glacial, or ice, period, and that, by the agency of this ice, the loose materials on the earth's surface, called drift or diluvium, were transported and accumulated.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A large body of ice which flows under its own mass, usually downhill.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a slowly moving mass of ice

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French, from Old French, cold place, from glace, ice, from Vulgar Latin *glacia, from Latin glaciēs; see gel- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Borrowing from French glacier, from Old French glace ("ice"), from Latin glacies ("ice"), from Proto-Indo-European *gel- (“cold”).

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Examples

  • A big risk of doing that is what they call glacier dust, which can make you quite sick, almost to same effects as like food poisoning.

    CNN Transcript Dec 13, 2006 2006

  • Hence the name glacier, which is derived from the Latin, glacies; French, glace, glacier.

    Ice and Glaciers 1909

  • Satellite and ice measurements show the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate, and mountain glacier melting is accelerating;

    Serendipity: What has software engineering got to do with climate change? - Part 2 2010

  • Satellite and ice measurements show the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate, and mountain glacier melting is accelerating;

    The latest science, summarized and assessed | Serendipity 2010

  • Ancient ecosystem thrives millions of years below Antarctic glacier is a EurekAlert article describing the discovery of an Antarctic ecosystem.

    An Unusual Ecosystem 2009

  • Satellite and ice measurements show the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate, and mountain glacier melting is accelerating;

    2010 February 17 | Serendipity 2010

  • Satellite and ice measurements show the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate, and mountain glacier melting is accelerating;

    2010 February | Serendipity 2010

  • Ancient ecosystem thrives millions of years below Antarctic glacier is a EurekAlert article describing the discovery of an Antarctic ecosystem.

    2009 July - Telic Thoughts 2009

  • Up here as well, photos from glaciers 100yrs ago compared to now are overwhelming in how little of the glacier is left.

    happy solstice 2005

  • The forty-eight-acre lake at the center of Moraine Hills State Park formed when a large piece of ice broke away from the main glacier (Wisconsonian glaciation period) and melted.

    Lake Defiance M-mv 2005

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