A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
morass
A morass is a tract of soft wet ground, a marsh or a bog, and specifically one that is difficult to cross. The word carries the sense of the difficulty as much as the wetness, which is why it moved so easily into figurative use for any situation that swallows effort. As a landscape term it is largely literary now, having been displaced in technical use by marsh, fen, bog, and mire.
Etymology
The word came into English from Dutch in the sixteenth century, and behind the Dutch is an Old French word from a Germanic root meaning marsh. That root is the same one behind English marsh and mire, so the word is a distant cousin of the plainer English terms it now competes with, having gone out through the continent and come back with a French accent.