: an elongated and usually open and mobile column or band (as of smoke, exhaust gases, or blowing snow)
c
: an animal structure having a main shaft bearing many hairs or filamentous parts
especially: a full bushy tail
d
: any of several columns of molten rock rising from the earth's lower mantle that are theorized to drive tectonic plate movement and to underlie hot spots
Noun
a hat with bright ostrich plumes
the Nobel Prize for Literature is the plume that all authors covet Verb
that jerk plumes himself on his supposed athletic skills
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Noun
Satellite imagery has detected a visible smoke plume, and an inversion is forecasted to trap smoke near the surface through Tuesday morning, worsening air quality conditions.—Tom Rogers, MSNBC Newsweek, 29 Apr. 2025 Without the mantle plume, Africa and Asia may have remained isolated for much longer, and the animals that made their way into and out of Africa, including our ancestors, could have been much different.—David Bressan, Forbes.com, 27 Apr. 2025
Verb
Both facilities, campuses that are part of the J. Paul Getty Museum, have managed to keep their revered collections of art, antiques and archives safe from the recent blazes and pluming smoke.—Thao Nguyen, USA TODAY, 18 Jan. 2025 Videos from the scene of the crash show dark gray smoke pluming out of the building the plane reportedly crashed into, and firefighters work to put out flames around the crash sight.—Julia Gomez, USA TODAY, 18 Dec. 2024 See All Example Sentences for plume
Word History
Etymology
Noun
Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin pluma small soft feather — more at fleece
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