floodtime

• flood-time
• flood time

floodtime (plural floodtimes)

1. A time (often an annual season) during which an area is flooded; the season when a river floods its banks.
   • 1922, Flora Annie Steel, “Nix Naught Nothing”, in English Fairy Tales‎, Macmillan, page 180:

     Now, on the way, he came to a big, rushing river, which neither he nor his army could cross, for it was flood-time and the water was full of dangerous whirlpools, where nixies and water wraiths lived, always ready to drown men.

   • 1944, Zane Grey, chapter 28, in The Wilderness Trek‎:

     In good seasons the stream must have been a fair little river, and during flood time it had spread all over the flat.

   • 1953, James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, New York, N.Y.: Knopf, →OCLC, part 2 (The Prayers of the Saints):

     The storm that raged in him to-night could not uproot this hatred, the mightiest tree in all John’s country, all that remained to-night, in this, John’s floodtime.

   • 1959, Theodora Kroeber, The Inland Whale, University of California Press, page 194:

     Each year, the river brought its deposit of rich, red silt at floodtime. When the flood receded, the Mohave planted his corn, his squash and beans.