A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
knoll
A knoll is a small rounded hill, distinct enough to be seen as a hill and small enough to walk over without noticing you have climbed. The word carries a specific shape: smooth, isolated, and convex, without a summit or a ridge. In the ocean the same word is used formally for a small rounded rise on the seafloor, smaller than a seamount.
Etymology
The word is Old English for a hilltop or a small hill and has relatives across the Germanic languages. It belongs to the very large set of English words for a rise in the ground, which is worth noticing as a group: knoll, hillock, tump, hummock, howe, butte, rise, brae, knowe, drumlin, and tor all describe something slightly different, and speakers of any one dialect use two or three of them.
Notes
Knowe is the Scots form of the same word and is still in ordinary use there. The initial k was pronounced in Middle English, as it was in knee, knife, and knight, and English dropped it from the sound while keeping it in the spelling.