Definition
nounAn elevated landmass smaller than a mountain.
Sentence Examples
You must go up the hill.
A banking scandal is sweeping across Capitol Hill.
The stone rolled down the hill.
Word Origin & History
From Middle English hil (“hill”), from Old English hyll (“hill”), from Proto-West Germanic *hulli (“hill”), from Proto-Germanic *hulliz (“hill”), from Proto-Indo-European *kl̥Hnís (“top, hill, rock”) (compare also Proto-Germanic *halluz (“stone, rock”)).
Cognate with Middle Dutch hille, hulle (“hill”), Low German hull (“hill”), Faroese hólur (“hill”), Icelandic and Old Norse hóll (“hill”), Norn hul (“hillock”), Norwegian hol (“low hillock”), Swedish kulle (“hill”), Catalan coll (“hill”), Italian colle (“hill”), Latin collis (“hill”), Lithuanian kalnas (“hill, mountain”), Albanian kallumë (“big pile, tall heap”), Russian холм (xolm, “hill”), Old English holm (“rising land, island”). More at holm.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"So this was my future home, I thought![…]Backed by towering hills, the but faintly discernible purple line of the French boundary off to the southwest, a sky of palest Gobelin flecked with fat, fleecy little clouds, it in truth looked a dear little city; the city of one's dreams."
— 1908, W[illiam] B[lair] M[orton] Ferguson, chapter IV, in Zollenstein, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC:
"Spread, heaped up, stacked with good things; and redolent of citrons and grapes, hilling round tall vases of wine;"
— 1849, Herman Melville, Mardi: And a Voyage Thither. […], volume II, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC:
"After the seeds were inserted, the earth was hilled up all around into a smooth little mound."
— 1977, Gene Weltfish, The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture, page 102:
"Ms. Davis — who at different points in the set called to mind Andrew Hill, Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, without resorting to mimicry — often led this charge, starting out with a blank canvas and creeping slantwise into a repeatable motif."
— 2015 June 18, Nate Chinen, “Review: Eric Revis Trio Lets the Music Lead the Way at the Jazz Gallery”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 16 Jun 2022: