tarn

noun

1. (Northern-England)A small mountain lake, especially in Northern England.

   “Thou Wind, that ravest without, / Bare craig, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree, / Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb, / Or lonely house, long held the witches' home, / Methinks were fitter instruments for thee, / Mad Lutanist! [footnote: Tairn is a small lake, generally if not always applied to the lakes up in the mountains, and which are the feeders of those in the valleys.[…]]”

   “Tarns are found in some of the vales, and are numerous upon the mountains. A Tarn, in a Vale, implies, for the most part, that the bed of the vale is not happily formed; that the water of the brooks can neither wholly escape, nor diffuse itself over a large area. Accordingly, in such situtions, Tarns are often surrounded by an unsightly tract of boggy ground; but this is not always the case, […]”

   “There Grendel was watching his blood flow out into the seething tarn.”

   “In another story the remarkable mystery of the umbrella lost at the shores of a tarn and retrieved at the seaside is explained by the underground communication between the two.”

2. (US)One of many small mountain lakes or ponds.

   “It [the caribou] makes a fine, bold study on the foreground of an evening scene among the mountain tarns of Northern Idaho, as it fulfils the ideal description of the stag given by [Walter] Scott and other writers.”

   “Off to either side of the road [Beartooth Highway], unforgettable mountain scenes arise beneath crisp mountain skies. Here is alpine country at its best, complete with lakes and tarns set amid truly rugged promontories.”

name

1. (error-lua-exec)A department of Occitania, France. Capital and largest city: Albi (INSEE code 81).
2. (error-lua-exec)A right tributary of the Garonne in southwestern France, flowing through the departments of Lozère, Aveyron, Tarn, Haute-Garonne and Tarn-et-Garonne.