Hammada

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A bare, stony plateau in the desert, with rock exposed and little or no sand or vegetation covering it
2. An elevated expanse of rough, rocky desert ground swept clean of loose sand by wind, found especially in North Africa
3. A flat, rocky desert upland where bare bedrock dominates the landscape and plant life is sparse or absent

Etymology: "Hammada" is an alternative spelling of "hamada," a term from geography for a barren, rocky desert plateau, usually of bare stone with little or no loose sand. It was borrowed from Arabic, where "ḥamāda" (حَمَادَة) carries the sense of a bare, stony upland, the kind of ground a traveller crosses on foot rather than over dunes. The English term reached the language through the study of North African and Saharan landscapes, where geographers needed a word for the flat, stony expanses that dominate much of the desert, as distinct from the sand seas that the word "erg" was borrowed to describe. The two spellings, "hamada" and "hammada," reflect the different ways European writers transliterated the Arabic, with the doubled consonant showing the emphasis in the original.

Synonyms: desert plateau, stony desert