MOUNTAINOUS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does mountainous mean? 

• MOUNTAINOUS (adjective)
  The adjective MOUNTAINOUS has 3 senses:

1. having hills and crags

2. like a mountain in size and impressiveness

3. containing many mountains

  Familiarity information: MOUNTAINOUS used as an adjective is uncommon.

 Dictionary entry details 

• MOUNTAINOUS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Having hills and crags

Synonyms:

cragged; craggy; hilly; mountainous

Context example:

hilly terrain

Similar:

rough; unsmooth (having or caused by an irregular surface)

Derivation:

mountain (a land mass that projects well above its surroundings; higher than a hill)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Like a mountain in size and impressiveness

Context example:

a mountainous dark man

Similar:

big; large (above average in size or number or quantity or magnitude or extent)

Sense 3

Meaning:

Containing many mountains

Similar:

highland; upland (used of high or hilly country)

Derivation:

mountain (a land mass that projects well above its surroundings; higher than a hill)

 Context examples 

Titan's tallest peak is 10,948 feet (3,337 meters) high and is found within a trio of mountainous ridges called the Mithrim Montes.

(Cassini Spies Titan's Tallest Peaks, NASA)

She shook her head decidedly, and Charles and Hal put the last odds and ends on top the mountainous load.

(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)

Cthulhu’s geology exhibits a wide variety of landscapes—from mountainous to smooth, and to heavily cratered and fractured.

(Methane Snow on Pluto’s Peaks, NASA)

Go to a mountainous area, perhaps covered with lots of powdered snow where you will see crocus lift their little heads up through the snow or moist soil.

(AstrologyZone.com, by Susan Miller)

Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.

(The Icy Mountains of Pluto, NASA)

The Dry Valleys, by contrast, are ice-free, mountainous regions, interspersed with glaciers, where little snow accumulates because they are scoured by winds.

(Soot transported from elsewhere in world contributes little to melting of some Antarctic glaciers, National Science Foundation)

He had escaped me, and I must commence a destructive and almost endless journey across the mountainous ices of the ocean, amidst cold that few of the inhabitants could long endure and which I, the native of a genial and sunny climate, could not hope to survive.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

The research is based on examination of the levels of dissolved black carbon (DBC) that persist in freshwater and saline lakes in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a mountainous polar desert across McMurdo Sound from the NSF's logistics hub in Antarctica, McMurdo Station.

(Antarctic lakes are a repository for ancient soot, NSF)

After a short silence, he told me, he did not know how I would take what he was going to say: that in the last general assembly, when the affair of the Yahoos was entered upon, the representatives had taken offence at his keeping a Yahoo (meaning myself) in his family, more like a Houyhnhnm than a brute animal; that he was known frequently to converse with me, as if he could receive some advantage or pleasure in my company; that such a practice was not agreeable to reason or nature, or a thing ever heard of before among them; the assembly did therefore exhort him either to employ me like the rest of my species, or command me to swim back to the place whence I came: that the first of these expedients was utterly rejected by all the Houyhnhnms who had ever seen me at his house or their own; for they alleged, that because I had some rudiments of reason, added to the natural pravity of those animals, it was to be feared I might be able to seduce them into the woody and mountainous parts of the country, and bring them in troops by night to destroy the Houyhnhnms’ cattle, as being naturally of the ravenous kind, and averse from labour.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Any of various hollow-horned, bearded ruminant mammals of the genus Capra, originally of mountainous areas of the Old World, especially any of the domesticated forms of C. hircus, raised for wool, milk, and meat.

(Goat, NCI Thesaurus)