tarn

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See also Tarn

[edit] English

From Old Norse tjǫrn (“a small mountain lake without tributaries”). Cognate with Norwegian tjern (“small forest or mountain lake”)

A tarn in the Lake District

tarn (plural tarns)

(Northern England) A small mountain lake, especially in Northern England.
- 1839, Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, Project Gutenberg (1997), 1,
  
  It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

a small mountain lake