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🗿 A famous monument 4️⃣ Top four people
Mount Rushmore

Mount Rushmore

5 3.0
A mountain in South Dakota with the carved faces of four US presidents
  • proper noun
  • /maʊnt ˈrʌʃmɔr/
translation icon : Monte Rushmore
  • Let your eye sweep across a photograph of Mount Rushmore, or better still, the real thing, and you will see four men who have a strong claim to be America's greatest presidents.
  • Mount Rushmore National Memorial
  • Mount Rushmore National Monument
  • faces on Mount Rushmore

Now I'm going away for five weeks, going up to South Dakota, going to Mount Rushmore, maybe the Badlands or Wyoming.

Examples

  • The faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt are carved into Mount Rushmore.

  • South Dakota is known for its vast prairie, supreme pheasant hunting, and the presidential faces carved into Mount Rushmore.

    Blog text (27)

  • None of us had ever seen Mount Rushmore in person before.

    Bound By Movement (2019)

  • How about we go see Mount Rushmore?

    Nebraska (2013)

  • Starting route to Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

    Bound By Movement (2019)

  • You know, I was thinking, after we drop you off, I might take the family up to the Dakotas to see Mount Rushmore.

    My Fellow Americans (1996)

  • Mount Rushmore and the Badlands are also cool.

    Blog text (2)

  • Neither Liz nor Harry knew anyone who lived in these parts, so Annie had booked a room at a small hotel near Mount Rushmore.

    Fiction book (1995)

  • Now I'm going away for five weeks, going up to South Dakota, going to Mount Rushmore, maybe the Badlands or Wyoming.

    Danny Jones

  • Mount Rushmore and its stone faces were hidden in swirling clouds that the woman in reception said weren't going to clear.

    Fiction book (1995)

Synonyms

Rushmore
vsMount Rushmore
27 4.9

A mountain in South Dakota with giant carved faces of four presidents

is the full formal name rather than the short familiar version
Mt. Rushmore
vsMount Rushmore
4.9

A mountain with the faces of four US presidents carved into the rock, visited by many people each year

is the full formal name rather than an abbreviated form

Surface Forms

Mount Rushmore main

Morphology

mount + Rushmore

The figurative sense relies on knowledge that Mount Rushmore is a monument showing four iconic presidential faces, so a learner who knows the constituents (including that Rushmore features four famous figures) can infer a metaphor meaning 'the top four or most iconic people' in a field. However, this is a culturally specific, named-reference metaphor rather than a regular compositional pattern, so understanding depends on background knowledge and is not fully predictable from general word-combination rules.

Etymology

Mount Rushmore is a real mountain where artists carved four huge presidential faces into the rock to honor important US leaders. So the name points to that famous monument and means 'a mountain with the carved faces of four presidents'.