Jebels

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Hills or mountains, particularly in Arabic-speaking regions, referring to natural elevated landforms
2. Elevated terrain such as hills or mountains, often used in Middle Eastern geography to denote rugged landscapes
3. Natural highlands or mountainous areas commonly identified in contexts relating to Arabic topographical features

Etymology: "Jebels" is simply the plural of "jebel", a word that English borrowed from French, which in turn took it from Arabic. The Arabic "jabal" means "mountain", and it is the same root behind a famous place name: the Rock of Gibraltar, whose name comes from "Jabal Tariq", the mountain of the Arab commander Tariq ibn Ziyad. Travellers in North Africa and the Middle East picked up the term and carried it into European languages, where it kept its plain sense of a mountain or hill. In English, "jebel" is used mainly of the bare, rocky hills that rise out of desert plains, particularly in Arabia and North Africa, where such landforms are common and often have no other name. The plural "jebels" simply refers to several of these hills, and the word has stayed largely a term for the travel writer and the geographer rather than an everyday noun.

Synonyms: mountains, hills, peaks, ridges, summits

Antonyms: valleys, plains, basins, lowlands, depressions