A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
coomb
A coomb is a short valley or hollow in the side of a hill, usually dry at the bottom and closed at the upper end. In southern England, it is the standard chalk-country landform, cut when the ground was frozen deep and meltwater had to run across the surface instead of soaking into the chalk. The spelling runs coomb, combe, coombe, and cwm depending on the county.
Etymology
This is one of the very few words English took from the Britons who were already here, rather than from the Germanic, Norse, or French that arrived later. The related Welsh word is cwm, which English also uses as a mountaineering term for a high glacial bowl. So the same word came into English twice, once as ordinary Old English vocabulary for a hollow in a hillside, and again much later, straight from Welsh, for a very different feature.