Sa-văn'nă, n.

n. [Sp. savana, sabana, a sheet for a bed, a piece of cloth sufficiently long and wide to cover a bed, a large plain covered with snow, from Lat. sabanum, Gr. σάβανον, a linen cloth.] An extensive open plain or meadow, or a plain destitute of trees, and covered with grass. [Also savannah.]

A savanna . . . is a plain of grass, affording pasturage in the rainy season; but a few shrubs also grow upon it. Pampas are vast plains without vegetation except during three months of the rainy season, when they yield fine grass. A steppe is properly a vast extent of country, slightly rolling, without woods, but not without large plants and herbs. Pampas and deserts are found alternating with steppes. A desert may have a sparing vegetation, and so differ from pampas: if it has any plants, they are scrubby and fibrous, with few leaves, and of a grayish color, and so it differs from steppes and savannas. But there are rocky and gravelly, sandy and salt, deserts. A heath is a level covered with the plant to which that name has been applied. Finally, a prairie differs from a savanna only in being under a zone where the seasons are not marked as wet and dry, but where the herbage corresponds to a variable moisture. J. Weiss. Atlantic Monthly.

Savanna flower (Bot.), an evergreen, climbing plant of the genus Echites, growing in Jamaica.