A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1323 entries
gaat
A gaat is a deep tidal channel cut between two barrier islands, or between an island and the mainland, connecting the open sea to the shallow flats behind. The tide runs both ways through it twice a day, which keeps it scoured out while everything around it silts up. On the Frisian coast of the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, the gaats are the only deep water in an otherwise shallow sea, and they are where the shipping goes.
Etymology
The word is Dutch and Low German and means, plainly, a hole or a gap. The standard spelling is gat, and the compound zeegat is a sea-gap. It is the same word as the English gate in its older sense of an opening rather than a barrier, which survives in the Norse-derived street names of northern English cities, where a gate is a way through rather than a thing that swings.
Notes
The gaats of the Wadden Sea migrate. They shift position over decades as sand moves along the coast, which is why the charts are revised constantly and why the old harbors of the Frisian coast keep silting up and going out of use.