mountainous

UK/ˈmaʊn.tɪ.nəs/US/ˈmaʊn.tɪ.nəs/

adjectiveB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,298 of 15,258mostly written

Mountainous means full of high peaks, or enormous in size. Mountainous country.

The size sense is used of waves, debts and piles of paper. Mountainous country is defended more easily than any other, which has decided several wars.

Definitions of mountainous

1adjectivemountainousFull of high peaks, or enormous in size.B2+
“The whole north of the country is mountainous and nearly empty.”

mountainous is a quality.

Where it comes from

Mountain plus -ous, after Middle French montagneux, from Latin mons, a mountain.

Latin
montāniōsus
Middle French
montagneux
English, today
mountainous

From mountain + -ous after Middle French montagneux, from Latin montāniōsus, from montānia, from Latin mons (“mountain”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

mountainous in the wild

Highlands or uplands are areas of high elevation such as a mountainous region, elevated mountainous plateau or high hills.
Highland
The northern plains are delimited in the west by the Scandinavian Mountains and the mountainous parts of the British Isles.
Geology of Europe
The southern mountainous region is bounded by the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.
Geology of Europe
The park covers 130,279 ha of wilderness, with most of that being mountainous.
Kwadacha Wilderness Provincial Park
The Himalaya kingdom was a mountainous country in the Himalayas, mentioned in the Puranas.
Himalaya kingdom

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

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