MEANING
1. The arrangement of natural and built features across the surface of an area.
2. The detailed study, description, or mapping of an area’s surface features.
Use it for
describing a landscape’s contours and spatial relationships; showing how terrain shapes a character’s movement; using a surface’s layout as a controlled metaphorDescribes how features of a place relate across its surface, rather than merely listing scenic objects. Writing functions: Setting / Spatial Description.
Words that belong together
- rugged topography
- the topography of a region
- local topography
On the page
The valley’s topography hid the village until the road turned sharply east.
In her memory, the house had acquired a different topography, with every passage leading back to the nursery.
The surveyor’s training in topography made the dry channel easy to recognize.
The expedition combined topography with observations of settlement and land use.
Word forms
- Base
- topography
Usage notes
Usually uncountable for a region’s surface configuration or its study; topographies for distinct configurations or detailed accounts. Register: technical. Commonness: moderately common in geographical or descriptive writing (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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