Definition
nounA portion of land or territory as defined by its landform, its geographical (and architectural) features.
nounA portion of land which the eye can comprehend in a single view, including all the objects thus seen.
Sentence Examples
Survey the landscape below.
The landscape is unfamiliar to me.
The woods and fields that are typical features of the English landscape
Word Origin & History
From an alteration (due to Dutch landschap) of earlier landskip, lantschip, from Middle English *landschippe, *landschapp, from Old English landsċipe, landsċeap (“region, district, tract of land”); in some senses from Dutch landschap (“region, district, province, landscape”), from Middle Dutch landscap, lantscap (“region”), from Old Dutch *landskepi, *landskapi (“region”). Cognate with Scots landskape, landskep, landskip (“landscape”), West Frisian lânskip (“landscape”), Low German landschop (“landscape, district”), German Landschaft (“landscape, countryside, scenery”), Danish landskab (“landscape, countryside”), Swedish landskap (“landscape, scenery, province”), Icelandic landskapur (“countryside”). By surface analysis, land + -ship.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Piſcat[or]. [...] [T]heſe Hills though high, bleak, and craggy, breed and feed good Beef, and Mutton above ground, and afford good ſtore of Lead within. / Viat[or]. They had need of all thoſe commodities to make amends for the ill Land-ſchape: [...]"
— 1676, Charles Cotton, chapter II, in The Compleat Angler. Being Instructions How to Angle for a Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream. Part. II., 5th edition, London: […] Richard Marriott, and Henry Brome […], →OCLC, page 12:
"Ahead the flanks of the Pennines gleamed faintly in the moonlight, looking as though they themselves were part of some dry and deserted lunar landscape."
— 1960 January, G. Freeman Allen, “"Condor"—British Railways' fastest freight train”, in Trains Illustrated, page 48:
"Its steel helped build America, from the skyscrapers dotting city landscapes to the cars speeding down highways, to the appliances inside millions of homes."
— 2025 June 13, Luciana Lopez and Chris Isidore, “US Steel and Nippon Steel say Trump has approved their partnership”, in CNN Business:
"The rolling Chocolate Hills of Bohol in the Philippines could easily be mistaken for a child’s landscape drawing."
— 2025 April 22, Joe Minihane, “24 of the world’s most unusual landscapes”, in CNN:
"In light of such conceptualisations of the power of linguistic landscapes, we set out to examine the connection between the visual landscape and the spoken landscape in our institution[.]"
— 2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 2: