hills

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of hill.

   Fog settled over the hills long after the valley had cleared.

   Vineyards covered the sunlit hills along the coast.

   Note

   The plain -s plural covers every sense of hill, not only the landscape. A gardener's hills are the mounds of earth heaped around plants, or the close clusters of plants themselves, an American use. A ballplayer's or a record collector's hills are something else again. The same spelling also serves the verb for heaping earth, and the two meet in the garden: she hills the corn, and the corn stands in hills.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of hill.

   The gardener hills the cornstalks once they reach knee height.

   All winter the wind hills the dry sand into low mounds along the shore.

   Note

   The he/she/it form of a verb with two related jobs. The broad one is heaping something into a mound, as the wind hills sand. The narrower, gardening one is drawing earth up around plants, as a grower hills a row of corn. Either way it wants an object, naming what is heaped or what is heaped around, and that object is what separates it from the plural noun spelled the same way.

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