alp

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alp

(ălp)

1. A mountain meadow, especially one used for pasturage.

2. A high mountain.

3. A very large mound or mass.

[Ultimately, partly via German Alp (from German dialectal (Alemannic) Alp, from Middle High German albe, from Old High German alba) and partly via French regional (Switzerland) alpe (probably of Alpine Romance origin; akin to Lombard alp and Italian alpe), from an indigenous pre-Roman Alpine language (also the source of Latin Alpēs, the Alps), Senses 2 and 3, back-formation from the Alps.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

alp

(ælp)

1. (Physical Geography) (in the European Alps) an area of pasture above the valley bottom but below the mountain peaks

2. (Physical Geography) a high mountain

[C14: back formation from Alps, from French Alpes (pl), from Latin Alpēs, from Greek Alpeis]

ALP

abbreviation for

(Government, Politics & Diplomacy) Australian Labor Party

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

alp

(ælp)

n.

a high mountain.

[1635–1645; back formation from Alps]

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Noun

alp - any high mountain

mountain, mount - a land mass that projects well above its surroundings; higher than a hill

Translations

alpe

alp

n → Berg m → in den Alpen

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

References in classic literature ?

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Then across the Alps scholars thronged from every country in Europe to listen and to learn.

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Our hotel sits at the water's edge--at least its front garden does--and we walk among the shrubbery and smoke at twilight; we look afar off at Switzerland and the Alps, and feel an indolent willingness to look no closer; we go down the steps and swim in the lake; we take a shapely little boat and sail abroad among the reflections of the stars; lie on the thwarts and listen to the distant laughter, the singing, the soft melody of flutes and guitars that comes floating across the water from pleasuring gondolas; we close the evening with exasperating billiards on one of those same old execrable tables.

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He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman.

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Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

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Next, I saw Hannibal passing the Alps, who told me "he had not a drop of vinegar in his camp."

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There is somewhat too much of the jodeling in the Alps.

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Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented.

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"Augh!" sighed he, "were we only on the other side the Alps, then we should have summer, and I could get my letters of credit cashed.

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She might have been taken--had been taken--to the top of the Alps and the bottom of Herculaneum, without disarranging a fold in her dress, or displacing a pin.

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They have seen the value of the talking wire to hold their valley villages together; and so have cries-crossed the Alps with a cheap and somewhat flimsy system of telephony that carries sixty million conversations a year.