What is "precipitous"

Usage examples of "precipitous".

He was like an acrophobe edging along a precipitous path, scared to look down, afraid of losing his balance and falling accidentally, afraid too of the impulse that might lead him to plunge purposefully into the void.

Then at last Badoglio could come at Ras Muguletu, the war minister of Ethiopia, with his entire army waiting like an old lion in the caves and precipitous heights of the natural mountain fortress of Ambo Aradam.

The overfalls of rock and the unfriendly thorn-trees, selfishly taking up all the room, necessitate frequent zigzags up and down the rocky, precipitous banks.

After a long, precipitous slope into the earth, the Raith Deeps opened up into a cavern bigger than most Paris cathedrals.

But as more arrows whizzed among them, Torquil was obliged to make a precipitous dismount as his valiant little rouncy went down with a piteous squeal, a feathered shaft deep in its chest and blood spraying from its nostrils.

The sea rose in precipitous mountain-masses, and anon wallowed in black abysmal chasms,--the clouds flew in a fierce rack overhead like the forms of huge witches astride on eagle-shaped monsters,--and with it all there was a close heat in the air, notwithstanding the tearing wind,--a heat and a sulphureous smell, suggestive of some pent-up hellish fire that but waited its opportunity to break forth and consume the land.

Kearny Street, extending northward, makes giant strides on the precipitous climb of Telegraph Hill, where topply buildings cling precariously to the heights.

These are on the very brink of the mesa, and have been built in recesses in the crowning ledge of sandstone of such size that they could conveniently be walled up on the outside, the outer surface of rude walls being continuous with the precipitous rock face of the mesa.

He leveled off, keeping his weight back but centered, adjusting the airfoil to slow the precipitous drop.

How many students of Euclid have been repelled by the Pons Asinorum, as by a lofty and precipitous rock, which no help of ladders could enable them to scale!

Peak of Sancy is the loftiest of the peaks, and Cantal is the most precipitous of these mountain heights.

Jondalar had lived in caves in steep cliffs with precipitous ledges, but nothing quite like the home of this Cave of Shamudoi.

No man could survive those climbs, not if the defenders were raining round shot and rocks down the precipitous slopes.

The mountains through which it forces its way on the other side are precipitous and wooded to their summits with coniferae, while the less abrupt side, along which the tract is carried, curves into green knolls in its lower slopes, sprinkled with grand Spanish chestnuts scarcely yet in blossom, with maples which have not yet lost the scarlet which they wear in spring as well as autumn, and with many flowering trees and shrubs which are new to me, and with an undergrowth of red azaleas, syringa, blue hydrangea--the very blue of heaven--yellow raspberries, ferns, clematis, white and yellow lilies, blue irises, and fifty other trees and shrubs entangled and festooned by the wistaria, whose beautiful foliage is as common as is that of the bramble with us.

I must say that until your arrival and intervention, my opinion of your kind was undergoing a most precipitous droppage indeed.