the.com/mound
a hill with ambition, built by ants, kings, and pitchers alike
means A rounded heap or raised mass of earth, stones, or other material — natural or piled up — rising above the surrounding ground.
from From an Old English word 'mund,' meaning hand, protection, or guardianship — the same root behind ideas of defending and enclosing. The sense slid from 'protective boundary' to 'raised earthwork used as a defense' and finally to any heap or rise, possibly nudged along by Dutch and Low German cousins meaning hedge or embankment. The word's older guardian-self still lingers faintly: a mound was first something that kept things in, or kept enemies out.
- pitcher's height
- baseball mounds rise exactly 10 inches above home plate
- termite skyscrapers
- some termite mounds tower over 30 feet tall
- ancient dead
- burial mounds hide kings across Europe and America
- venus mound
- anatomy quietly borrowed the word for soft hills
- snake builders
- Ohio's Serpent Mound coils 1,300 feet long
cahokia mounds — largest pre-columbian earthwork in north america, near st. louis, with monks mound standing 100 feet tall
serpent mound — 1,348-foot-long effigy mound in ohio shaped like a coiled snake, built by indigenous peoples
mississippian mounds — thousands of earthen mounds built by mississippian culture from 1100-1600 ce across southeastern united states