Pl. wadies, wadis, wadys. [Arab. wādī.] In certain Arabic-speaking countries, a ravine or valley that in the rainy season becomes a watercourse; the stream or torrent running through such a ravine.
1839. Kinnear, Cairo, Petra & Damascus, iii. (1841), 93. Our route during the two next days continued among narrow rocky wadies of a less desolate appearance.
1843. Whittier, Patucket Falls, Pr. Wks. 1889, I. 360. It resembled … some Arabian wady, exhausted by a year’s drought.
1850. W. Irving, Mahomet, i. (1853), 3. Some of the former occupied the fertile wadies, or valleys, scattered here and there among the mountains.
1856. Stanley, Sinai & Pal., i. II. 70. A stair of rock brought us into a wâdy (Sidri), enclosed between red granite mountains…. I cannot too often repeat, that these wâdys are exactly like rivers, except in having no water.
1912. S. R. Driver (transl. of Judg. v. 21), in Expositor, Feb., 121. The wady Kishon swept them away, The on-coming wady.
