malpais
Americannoun
Etymology
Origin of malpais
1835–45, < Spanish mal país bad country
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The rock surface is a layer of black malpais, through which the totem signatures have been pecked, showing the light stone beneath, and thus rendering them very conspicuous.
From Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1895-1896, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1898, pages 519-744 by Fewkes, Jesse Walter
Into water-gutted arroyos they descended, slid down breakneck shale ridges, climbed like heather cats the banks of dry washes, pounded over white porous malpais on which no vegetation grew.
From Oh, You Tex! by Raine, William MacLeod
Parts of our Arizona range were covered with great beds of broken malpais rock, really black lava, hard as iron, with edges sharp and jagged.
From Ranching, Sport and Travel by Carson, Thomas
From it one looked down into the deep gorge of the Southern Guaso Nyero, and across to a tangle of eroded mountains and malpais that filled the eye.
From African Camp Fires by White, Stewart Edward
Tell him to send his posse across the malpais toward the rim-rock.
From Oh, You Tex! by Raine, William MacLeod
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
