[f. BLUFF a.] A cliff or headland with a broad precipitous face. (First used in N. America, and still mostly of American landscapes.)
1737. Wesley, Wks. (1830), I. 63. Savannah stands on a flat bluff, so they term any high land hanging over a creek or river.
1776. L. McIntosh, in Sparks, Corr. Amer. Rev. (1853), I. 150. A bluff or sandhill thirty feet high or more above the water.
1830. Lyell, Princ. Geol., xv. (1850), 211. The … boundaries of the alluvial region … consist of cliffs or bluffs, which on the east side of the Mississippi are very abrupt, and are undermined by the river at many points.
1837. W. Irving, Capt. Bonneville (1849), 45. The wild and picturesque bluffs in the neighborhood of his lonely grave.
1842. Tennyson, Gold. Year, 76. I heard … the great echo flap And buffet round the hills from bluff to bluff.
1865. Geikie, Scen. & Geol. Scot., vii. 188. Bold bluffs, that mark the limits of an ancient shore.
