Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009

In message
<1b72f611-19ab-4c44-be43-5005a5d4a50d@h11g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>,
Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman@yahoo.com> writes

I've maybe missed it, but presumably the "moor" in moorhen derives from
"mere" (a lake).
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere>
However, I can see no real connection between "mere" and "moor", which
can indeed have boggy, marshy areas but, more often than not, don't.

I never thought to look in a dictionary. I was more interested in
expressing what a moor means to me. The flat wetland meaning is
secondary in that it holds back, coyly, in the mind's eye, until the
uplands meaning has done with parading itself.

If the moor = marsh word is Saxon, and the East of England is Anglian,
whatever the Angles were, I can see some sense in 'moor' not being the
word used for the Fens and Broads I mentioned. Somerset was West Saxon
Wessex, and Otmoor may also have been in Saxon country for all I know,
as it's not more than few miles north of the Thames.

My time-frozen mental map of Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria
gets in the way at times like this.

Moors and meres. Meres are common in northwest England.

An interesting illustration of how passionate people are about
questions of nomenclature. If they're anything like biochemists, the
same people will probably claim to have no interest in nomenclature if
you ask them in a general way.

A bog has acidified soil.

A marsh has salt water, and is often somewhat tidal.

A swamp is any old bit of wet ground that has too much soil and
vegetation to be called a "lake" or "pond".

Quoth the OED:

bog, n.1: A piece of wet spongy ground, consisting chiefly of decayed
or decaying moss and other vegetable matter, too soft to bear the
weight of any heavy body upon its surface; a morass or moss.

fen, n.1: Low land covered wholly or partially with shallow water, or
subject to frequent inundations; a tract of such land, a marsh.

morass, n.: A wet swampy tract, a bog, a marsh; an area of very wet or
muddy ground; (as a mass noun) boggy land.

marsh, n.1: Low-lying land, often flooded in wet weather and usually
more or less waterlogged throughout the year; a tract or area of such
land.  See also SALT-MARSH n.

swamp, n.: A tract of low-lying ground in which water collects; a
piece of wet spongy ground; a marsh or bog. Orig. and in early use
only in the N. American colonies, where it denoted a tract of rich
soil having a growth of trees and other vegetation, but too moist for
cultivation.

Quoth AHD3, indicating some transpondial differences in meaning:

bog, n.: 1.a. An area having a wet, spongy, acidic substrate composed
chiefly of sphagnum moss and peat in which characteristic shrubs and
herbs and sometimes trees usually grow.  b. Any of certain other
wetland areas, such as a fen, having a peat substrate.  Also called
/peat bog/.  2. An area of soft, naturally waterlogged ground.

fen, n.: Low, flat, swampy land: a bog or marsh.

marsh, n.: An area of soft, wet, low-lying land, often characterized
by grassy vegetation and often forming a transition zone between water
and land.

morass, n.: 1. An area of low-lying, soggy ground.

swamp, n.: 1.a. A seasonally-flooded bottomland with more woody plants
than a marsh and better drainage than a bog.  b. A lowland region
saturated with water.

-GAWollman