- 1小岩穴、園林石窟；（天主教）聖母洞、仿露德的聖龕。
A grotto is a small cave that people find pretty, or one they have built to look pretty — in a garden, by the sea, in a park. It is not a huge dark cave for explorers; the word already carries “small and attractive.” Churches and Catholic families, though actually, often use grotto for a little shrine that looks like a holy cave, after the famous one at in France. In the Philippines that religious sense is very common; in other English you will meet both the garden cave and the Mary shrine. For an ordinary hole in a rock, people often just say cave, unless they want that pretty or holy colour. The word can feel a little old-fashioned or literary.
組成From Italian grotta, from Vulgar Latin grupta, from Classical Latin crypta (an underground room). Same Latin source as English crypt, which kept the “underground room” meaning.
原始詞典資料6 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
grottonoun/ˈɡɹɒt.əʊ/
- 1
A small cave.
- 2
An artificial cavern-like retreat.
- ...But, while we are waiting for the temple, can you not show us the altar?—we want to see your grotto." Pope desired nothing better than to show his new toy, and led the way to the pretty and fanciful cave, which was but just finished.
- 3
A Marian shrine, usually built in a cavern-like structure.
- 4
A local organization of cavers that typically organizes trips to caves and provides information and training for caving; a caving club.
- An earlier attempt to organize a grotto in the Indiana, PA, area in the mid-1970s failed to succeed, but from it developed the informal Chestnut Ridge Explorers Association.
- By the mid-1940s members of local grottos (regional clubs of cavers within the National Speleological Society) were exploring Porcupine Cave (Bloch, 1946).
- 5
A secretive name for a local group of underground Satanists.
- 6
A garden or roadside shrine with a small cave containing a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary (usually Our Lady of Lourdes and sometimes paired with a water feature)
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。