CHAPARRAL • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Chaparral

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/ʃˌæpərˈæl/ Listen

noun

Chaparral n.

A thicket of low evergreen oaks.

An almost impenetrable thicket or succession of thickets of thorny shrubs and brambles.

Chaparral cock; fem. Chaparral hen (Zool.), a bird of the cuckoo family (Geococcyx Californianus), noted for running with great speed. It ranges from California to Mexico and eastward to Texas; called also road runner, ground cuckoo, churea, and snake killer. It is the state bird of New Mexico.

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Etymology of 'Chaparral'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Chaparral" Quotes from Famous Books

... rode, the fog receded slowly. He left the chaparral and rode by green marshes cut with sloughs and stained with vivid patches of orange. The frogs in the tules chanted their hoarse matins. Through brush-covered plains once more, with sparsely wooded hills in the distance, and again the tules, the marsh, the patches of orange. He rode through ...

— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... in all stages of advancement; here two elk heads and a buffalo; there a gaunt coyote crouching in the chaparral; a cluster of giant oaks; far off, a waving line of mountain peaks; a canon with vultures sailing high above it; cow boys, and a shoreless sea of prairie, with no shadows except those cast by filmy clouds drifting against ...

— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... examine the wide circle of the horizon with eyes that were trained to note every aspect of the wilderness. On his right the plains melted away in gentle swell after swell, until they met the horizon. Their brown surface was broken only by the spiked and thorny cactus and stray bits of chaparral. ...

— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler

... in the range is so closely restricted to special localities. It is usually found apart, standing deep in chaparral on sunny hill-and canon-sides where there is but little depth of soil, and, where found at all, it is quite plentiful; but the ordinary traveler, following carriage-roads and trails, may ascend the range many times ...

— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... our economy. This may apply to society. We are all charmed with the luxuriance of a semi-tropical landscape, so violently charmed that we become in time tired of its overpowering bloom and color. But what is the charm of the wide, treeless desert, the leagues of sand and burnt-up chaparral, the distant savage, fantastic mountains, the dry desolation as of a world burnt out? It is not contrast altogether. For this illimitable waste has its own charm; and again and again, when we come to a world of vegetation, where the vision is shut in by beauty, we shall have an irrepressible ...

— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

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