A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1054 entries
ben
A mountain, in Scotland and Ireland — and in practice the big ones, the ones that stand up alone with a name attached. Ben Nevis, Ben Macdui, Ben Lomond, Ben Bulben. A ben is distinguished from the surrounding high ground by having a summit worth walking to; the lower rolling stuff is a fell, a brae, or simply the hill.
Etymology
Scottish Gaelic beinn, the dative form of beann, which is what got anglicized because it is the form that appears after prepositions — the shape of the word people heard when someone said they were going to the mountain. Irish has the same word as binn. The underlying sense is a peak, a horn, or a point, and it is related to the Gaelic word for a horn on an animal, which is a way of seeing a summit that Alpine languages share.