cirque

noun

1. (historical)A Roman circus.

   “Nero exhibited theſe Spectacles in his own Gardens, impiouſly joining to them the Diverſions of the Cirque, and appearing himſelf publicly in the Habit of a Charioteer, ſitting in his Chariot[…].”

2. A curved depression or natural amphitheatre, especially one in a mountainside at the end of a valley.

   “Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank / Soil to a plash? toads in a poisoned tank, / Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage— / The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.”

   “Of course it's going to be bad whenever the clouds let loose, but up here pussyfooting along the perimeter of toothy cirques and dead drops of anywhere from eighty to three hundred feet, it would be a disaster.”

   “When the soldiers were not lost among tattered skeins of fog, they could see far out into the cirque, as if it were a bay of black water.”

   “Only a few lichens and mosses colonize the rocky walls of cirques and nunataks.”

3. (dated, literary)Something in the shape of a circle or ring.

   “[T]here our camp / Lay pitched that day beneath the sun's wide glare, / Amid the omnipresent desert wastes, / And few men stirred abroad. […] [A]nd the tents / Sagged lifeless all around their dusky cirque, / Whose every rope shone burnished in the glare, / And every tent-pin.”