Other forms: glens
A glen is a narrow valley, especially in Scotland. Down the glen, a Highland glen, the glen was empty.
It is narrower and steeper than a strath, which is the broad one — the pair is standard in Scottish geography. Glens fill the place names of the Highlands, and many of them were emptied of people in the clearances. Note that the word came into English from Gaelic, which is unusual.
1nounglenA narrow valley, especially in Scotland.
“We walked through a quiet glen with a stream running between steep hills.”
glen is a valley.
GLEN → GLENcoe, and every Scottish valley like it
Glencoe in Scotland is one, and the name is the word: a thin valley with the hills close on each side.
hooks ontovalley
Irish and Scottish Gaelic gleann means a valley, from a Celtic root. English borrowed it directly.
Proto-Indo-European
*glend- — shore
Proto-Celtic
*glendos — valley
Scottish Gaelic
gleann
Irish
gleann
Middle English
glen
English, today
glen
Built from
From Middle English glen, borrowed from Irish gleann and Scottish Gaelic gleann, Old and Middle Irish glend, glenn (“mountain valley”), from Proto-Celtic glendos (“valley”), hypothetically from Proto-Indo-European glend- (“shore”) but the word may have been borrowed from a non-Indo-European qfa-sub language. Compare gv glion, Welsh glyn. a doublet of glyn.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire