Champaign - What does it mean?
champaign | |
(geography, archaic) Open countryside, or an area of open countryside.
*:
*:And therwith torned theyr horses and rode ouer waters and thurgh woodes tyl they came to theyre busshement / where as syr Lyonel and syr Bedeuer were houyng / The romayns folowed fast after on horsbak and on foote ouer a ch?payn vnto a wood
*1605 , William Shakespeare, King Lear , I.i:
*:Of all these bounds even from this line to this, / With shadowy forests and with champaigns riched, / With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads, / We make thee lady.
*, II.ii.3:
*:So Segrave in Leicestershireis sited in a champaign at the edge of the wolds, and more barren than the villages about it, yet no place likely yields a better air.
(obsolete) A battlefield.
Pertaining to open countryside; unforested, flat.
*, Folio Society, 2006, vol.1, p.206:
champaign
English
Alternative forms
* champeyne * champaine * champainNoun
(en noun)Adjective
(en adjective)- They are seated alongst the sea-coast, encompassed toward the land with huge and steepie mountains, having betweene both, a hundred leagues or thereabouts of open and champaine ground.