Listed here are ten words derived from some root form referring to some form of watercourse or waterway, such as a river, sea, stream or lake. Words designating geographical features like these tend to be particularly old due to the obvious need for humans to describe the world around us. Sea, mere, brook, stream, burn, tide, ford and well, for instance, were all found in Old English and are more than 1,000 years old. Ocean is a more recent addition to the language adopted from French in the late thirteenth century and descended ultimately from the Greek word okeanos, which referred to the vast river that the Ancient Greeks supposed encircled the world. The word river was also adopted from French in the early fourteenth century and replaced the Old English word ea, which is still retained in some dialects of English and in English place names like Eton, Mersey and Romney.
The word archipelago was first recorded in English in the early 1500s, when it was originally used as another name for the Aegean Sea, the body of water lying between mainland Greece and Turkey. The word literally means ‘chief sea’ in Greek, formed from the prefix arkhi- (the same prefix seen in words like archduke and archbishop) and pelagos, the Greek word for ‘sea’. As the Aegean is so famously strewn with islands, eventually archipelago came to apply less specifically to any body of water containing a vast number of islands and eventually, in the nineteenth century, to a group or chain of islands itself.
Today, the word barbican is probably most familiar to English speakers thanks to the names of various performing arts facilities and theatres, most notably the famous Barbican Centre in London, whilst the original meaning of the word has been all but lost. Historically, a barbican was an outer tower or gatehouse at the entrance to a castle, but the word could also be used to describe a fort or similar defensive structure at the end of a bridge, a temporary or movable wooden watchtower, and a narrow opening or loophole in the wall of a fort through which arrows or guns could be fired. Dating from the fourteenth century in English, the word itself is believed to have been adapted from the equivalent French term barbacane or barbaquenne, which in turn is a derivative of the Arabic word for a canal or water channel, barbakh.
Used in a general sense to describe a calamitous disaster or fiasco, the word debacle was originally a French geographical term, débâcle (from the verb débâcler, meaning ‘to free’ or ‘to unbar’), used to describe the melting of river ice during the spring thaw and the sudden flood or surge of water that ensues. The word was first recorded in this original sense in English in the early 1800s, whilst the first use of the word in the metaphorical sense of a sudden downfall or disaster was first recorded in William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair in 1847.
On its earliest appearance in English in the late fifteenth century, the verb derive originally meant to draw or divert water from one location to another, particularly in the sense of channelling water from its source into a stream or reservoir. In this sense, the word is descended from the Latin equivalent verb derivare, which is itself formed from the Latin word for a stream or brook, rivus. Its more general sense, meaning to ‘originate’ or ‘develop’, did not begin to appear until the mid-sixteenth century, with the first use of derive in an etymological context first used in 1567.
As a golf term, referring to the main length of a golf course between the tee and the green, the word fairway dates from the early 1910s. Originally, however, the word was used to describe a navigable river channel or waterway, especially one deep enough for larger boats and vessels to be piloted down, or else one acting as a route between sandbanks or similar obstacles down which a ship can be transported into and out of harbour safely. Dating from the sixteenth century, it is this sense of an open, unobstructed area between surrounding hazards or more treacherous terrain that is maintained in the use of fairway in golf.
First used as an English word in the mid-seventeenth century, the term lacuna appears in a variety of different contexts in the language, all of which imply some sense of an empty space or hollow – at its very earliest, in the mid-1600s, the word was used to refer to a missing or intentionally blank section in a document. Now, a lacuna can also be a microscopic space between two neighbouring cells; a cavity in a bone; a sac or space in the anatomy of certain creatures, used in their circulatory system; a tiny indentation or pit in the surface of a leaf; or, in linguistics, the ‘gap’ found when a word from one language has no obvious translation in another. Also used more generally as another word for a pit or hole, lacuna is of Latin origin and is ultimately derived from the Latin for ‘lake’, lacus.
In its earliest form, dating from in the late sixteenth century in English, the word maelstrom is believed to have specifically applied to a vast and devastatingly powerful whirlpool located off the Arctic coast of Norway that was capable of drawing in ships and other vessels from a considerable distance and pulling them beneath the waves. A loanword from Dutch, the word is derived from the verb malen, meaning ‘to whirl’ or ‘to grind’, and stroom, the Dutch word for ‘stream’. The metaphorical use of the word, referring to a tumultuous state of confusion or chaos, dates from the nineteenth century.
Rheum is the general name for any of the thin, watery fluids naturally secreted by the body, and in particular those discharged from the eyes, nose or mouth. Produced by the mucus membranes of the head, rheum was once thought to be produced in the brain and was even believed to be capable of causing disease, although both theories are now known to be untrue. The word itself entered the language in the fourteenth century from an equivalent French term reume, which is in turn derived from the Greek word for a stream, rheuma, and ultimately the verb rhein, meaning ‘to flow’. The same root is the source of several other English words, including the similar term catarrh (taken from the Greek katarreo, meaning ‘flow down’), rheostat, rheumatoid, and the medical suffix -rrhoea.
The earliest recorded use of the word rival in English dates from the fifteenth century when, far from its familiar modern meaning, the word described a shore or riverbank suitable for landing a boat. The sense of the word to mean ‘competitor’ or ‘opponent’ dates from considerably later, towards the end of the sixteenth century, and stems from the related Latin word rivalis (a derivative of rivus, meaning ‘stream’), which was historically used to describe a person who lives on the opposite side of a river from another with whom they compete over use of the water.
The fragrant Mediterranean herb rosemary was originally known as rosmarine, a name dating back into antiquity and first used in the early Old English period. This historical name, seldom used in English today, is derived directly from the Latin phrase ros marinus meaning literally ‘dew of the sea’ (from the Latin mare, meaning ‘sea’, as in maritime and submarine), indicating that the plant typically requires very little water and can in some areas survive solely on the water it obtains from nearby sea mists and frets. The corrupted name rosemary first appeared in the early 1400s.