Glaciology

The sixteenth entry is o circo glaciar, the rock basin a glacier is born in, and it is the one thing on this page for which English never made a word of its own. It borrowed three. « Cirque » came from French, which had it from Latin circus, a ring, and it is the term of the textbooks and of anyone who learned mountains in the Alps. « Corrie » came from Scottish Gaelic coire, a cauldron, and it is what the same hollow is called in the Highlands, where the shape suggested a cooking pot rather than an arena. « Cwm » came from Welsh, and English owns that one twice over, because Old English had already taken the same Brittonic word as cumb, which survives in the « combe » of the West Country and in names such as Ilfracombe and High Wycombe. So the word a writer reaches for says where the mountains were learned rather than what the hollow is. Portuguese needed none of that: o circo glaciar is built on the everyday word for a ring of seats, and it is the same from one end of the language to the other.