alluvial plain
1
5.8
- noun
- /əˈluːviəl pleɪn/
- Specialized
:
llano aluvial
- The rich alluvial plain near the river is fertile and perfect for farming crops.
- rich alluvial plain
- great alluvial plain
Examples
-
The rich alluvial plains where much of the world's food is produced today were built by geological erosion.
Academic text (1997) -
A high water table, alluvial plains, and frequent flooding have the potential to expand the available breeding sites for the Anopheles mosquito, which acts as a vector for malaria (see figure 1a).
Academic text (2008) -
The few quarries in the alluvial plains outside the riverbanks do not provide enough sediment, and little sand is now available in the region.
Academic text (2008) -
Canyons and alluvial plains jumble together in swarms of faults, cast grey-brown in the hot sun.
Fiction book (1992) -
In the latter half of the 1890s, the French colonial government removed the Bemazava from the Sambirano's fertile alluvial plain and placed them on indigenous reserves.
Academic text (1995) -
The coastlands of northern Sicily from Taormina to Trapani alternate between narrow alluvial plains and rocky spurs, which often leave little space for communications.
Academic text (2010) -
This regular cycle of wet and dry seasons made routine the bounty of the great alluvial plains below the mountains, fertilized by the plateau's silty runoff.
Fiction book (1990) -
Acquiring these heavy and unwieldy slabs from across vast alluvial plains would have been an expensive, labor-intensive activity—not unlike studying them.
Academic text (2008) -
But the walls... the walls are but humble masonry behind which is only the soft, loamy soil deposited over centuries by the Old Man, the meanderin' Mississippi, as it fanned its way back and forth across the great alluvial plain, leaving earth.
-
It's the largest river delta on the Gulf of Corinth, a flat, well-watered alluvial plain sheltered to the south by a wall of mountains and bordered to the north by the turquoise gulf and its white, pebbled beach.
Academic text (2004)
Synonyms
98
1.0
A large flat area of land with few trees
33
5.8
Flat low land next to a river that often floods
11
4.6
Low land next to a river that can flood
5
3.7
Flat land next to a river that often floods when the river rises
A flat area of land made by soil left by rivers
How Wide
- Specialized
1
5.8
- Specialized
1
9.8
- Specialized
1
7.5
72
3.1
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun is a direct composition of 'alluvial' (relating to river-deposited sediment) + 'plain' (a flat area), so a learner who knows both constituents can infer it denotes a flat area formed by river sediments. This is a literal, domain-specific descriptive compound found across languages (e.g., Spanish 'llanura aluvial'), making the meaning immediately recoverable.
Etymology
Alluvial plain comes from alluvial (soil left by water) and plain ('flat land'). Rivers carry soil and mud and drop them over time, making a wide, flat, rich area, so the phrase means land made by rivers and often good for farming.