[ad. Fr. escarpement, f. escarper: see prec.] The condition of being escarped; hence concr.
1. Ground cut into the form of an escarp for the purpose of fortification.
1802. James, Milit. Dict., Escarpment. See Declivity.
1847. Disraeli, Tancred, III. VI. i. 141. The living rock … formed the impregnable bulwarks and escarpments.
1860. Russell, Diary India 1858–9, I. 82. The old Porto Batavo walls still surround the town, with moat and escarpments.
1860. Luck of Ladysmede, I. 93. From which a natural escarpment swept down towards the river-level on one side.
2. Geol. ‘The abrupt face or cliff of a ridge or hill range’ (Page). Also attrib.
1813. Bakewell, Introd. Geol. (1815), 70. It is only on the sides of the nearly perpendicular peaks and escarpments that the bare rock is visible.
1845. Darwin, Voy. Nat., viii. (1852), 165. The view is generally bounded by the escarpment of another plain.
1870. Yeats, Nat. Hist. Comm., 23. Plains of New Red Sandstone and Lias, succeeded by two great escarpments, the edges of table-lands.
1880. Haughton, Phys. Geog., v. 216. The western, or Libyan chain, is merely the escarpment edge of the plateau of the Sahara Desert.
b. transf.
1853. Kane, Grinnell Exp., viii. (1856), 56. A naked escarpment of ice, twelve hundred feet high.
1856. Whittier, Panorama, 2. [The] long escarpment of half-crumbled wall.
