El Dorado
1
9.9
- noun
- /ɛl dɔˈrɑːdoʊ/
- Literature
:
El Dorado
- I just thought that, after all, since El Dorado is the city of gold--
Examples
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El Dorado, the city of gold.
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And it is the key to finding El Dorado and all its treasures.
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But why would she be looking for El Dorado, Mrs Brown?
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Could this be... could it be El Dorado?
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- But if this is El Dorado... ...where is... where is the gold?
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My lords, may the people of El Dorado offer you our tribute.
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Cortes roamed the New World for years in search of El Dorado (the City of Gold).
Blog text (5) -
In 1616, Sir Walter was released from the Tower of London in order to conduct a second expedition to Venezuela in search of El Dorado.
Blog text (20) -
Many explorers spent their lives searching for El Dorado, believing it to be a land filled with treasures.
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The story of El Dorado has inspired countless adventurers to seek out riches in uncharted territories.
Synonyms
4
9.9
An imagined place where people expect to find lots of money and success
Surface Forms
Morphology
El + Dorado
The components are Spanish rather than English — literally 'El Dorado' = 'the golden' — so a learner who knew those constituents could infer an association with gold/wealth. However, the conventional sense as a mythical place or metaphor for an unattainable ideal is a cultural/lexicalized extension that is not fully predictable from the literal parts, making the relation only partially transparent.
Etymology
El Dorado may come from a famous story about a leader who covered his body in gold dust and dove into a lake as part of a ritual. Because people imagined a whole city or land of gold, El Dorado came to mean a dream place of great 'wealth' and 'opportunity'.