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steppe
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
steppe
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Farmland, especially among growing crops, open grassland, steppes, semi-deserts.
▪ Galloping horses, endless deserts and grassland steppes.
▪ In 376, however, the Visigoths found themselves under extreme pressure from the Huns, an Asiatic people from the steppes.
▪ In the steppes and the Caucasus they knew the dead could rise again, and how they could be stopped.
▪ Saltcoats was made up of lumpy steppe.
▪ Their linguistic legacy is still to be found in the major river valleys of the steppe and forest-steppe.
▪ They settled the steppes so successfully that their numbers grew to forty-five thousand in less than a century.
▪ Wheat descends from three grasses that hybridized on the Anatolian steppes.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Steppe

Steppe \Steppe\, n. [From Russ. stepe, through G. or F. steppe.] One of the vast plains in Southeastern Europe and in Asia, generally elevated, and free from wood, analogous to many of the prairies in Western North America. See Savanna.

Steppe murrain. (Far.) See Rinderpest.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
steppe

vast treeless plain of southeastern Europe and of Asia, 1670s, from German steppe and directly from Russian step', of unknown origin. Introduced in Western Europe by Humboldt.

Wiktionary
steppe

n. 1 The grasslands of Eastern Europe and Asia. Similar to (North American) prairie and (African) savannah. 2 More properly, the name given vast cold, dry grass-plains.

WordNet
steppe

n. extensive plain without trees (associated with eastern Russia and Siberia)

Wikipedia
Steppe

In physical geography, a steppe is an ecoregion, in the montane grasslands and shrublands and temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biomes, characterized by grassland plains without trees apart from those near rivers and lakes. The prairie (especially the shortgrass and mixed prairie) is an example of a steppe, though it is not usually called such. It may be semi- desert, or covered with grass or shrubs or both, depending on the season and latitude. The term is also used to denote the climate encountered in regions too dry to support a forest, but not dry enough to be a desert. The soil is typically of chernozem type.

Steppes are usually characterized by a semi-arid and continental climate. Extremes can be recorded in the summer of up to and in winter, . Besides this huge difference between summer and winter, the differences between day and night are also very great. In the highlands of Mongolia, can be reached during the day with sub-zero °C (sub 32 °F) readings at night.

The mid-latitude steppes can be summarized by hot summers and cold winters, averaging of precipitation per year. Precipitation level alone is not what defines a steppe climate; potential evapotranspiration must also be taken into account.

Steppe (disambiguation)

Steppe is an ecological zone consisting of plains generally lacking trees.

Steppe may also refer to:

  • Eurasian Steppe, the Eurasian steppe reaching from Mongolia to Hungary
  • Harry Steppe, a Jewish-American Vaudeville actor
  • The Jewish Steppe, a documentary about Soviet Jews

Usage examples of "steppe".

They were fast long-distance runners that could outdistance their predators only on the firm level surfaces of the windy steppes.

They would surely turn him out, and in the freezing cold night of the periglacial steppes there was no place to go.

They lived year-round in the northern periglacial regions of the steppes, where the cold was deeper but dry, and snow was slight, feeding in winter on the coarse, dry standing hay.

The few people who inhabited those periglacial steppes had little opportunity to meet anyone new, and the excitement of this chance encounter would fuel discussions and fill the stories of Falcon Camp for a long time to come.

They lived on dogback, up in the northern steppes, hunting the big grazing sauroids and anything else that moved with their huge two-meter 15mm rifles.

Fireheel, but most on small shaggy mounts bred of the fierce tarpans roaming the steppes.

Usually they fed during part of the night, since they traveled so much during the day and needed large quantities of the rough grass of the steppes to sustain them.

She had no intention of depending on their dried traveling food for their morning meal, though the steppes had fewer fat birds to feed after they ate.

Pangani River north and west, up toward Arusha, beside the Masai Steppe, Kilimanjaro towering before us, more image than mountain, silhouetted gray and black against the hazy pink light of dawn.

The pen offered no shelter, being merely a circle of open steppe surrounded by barbed wire guarded by sentries.

China--and known to the Tibetan lama, the Buryat shaman of the steppes and to the warlock of the South Seas alike.

Split River and around the tall, flat-topped buttes that dotted this stretch of steppe with brooding, sharp-edged cliffs.

But it turned out to be much harder to hunt deer and boar in the forests than it had been to ambush reindeer crossing rivers on the open steppe.

She had dreaded the thought of leaving this pleasant valley and facing more grueling days of traveling the parched windy steppes, dreaded the thought of traveling any more at all.

Katya stared across the wide steppe, at the two dust clouds roiling behind the hiwi Nikolai and the escaping prisoner Breit, galloping away.