A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
swash
The swash is the sheet of water that runs up a beach after a wave breaks, and its return down the slope is the backwash. Between them, they do most of the work of moving sediment on a shore: Swash carries material up and, because waves arrive at an angle, slightly along the beach, while backwash takes it straight down the slope, so the net result is a zigzag that moves sand along the coast.
Etymology
The word is imitative and appears in English in the sixteenth century, one of a family of words built to sound like moving water: swash, splash, slosh, slap, swill, and wash. The swaggering sense in swashbuckler comes from the same word, describing the noise of a sword banged against a shield.
Notes
That zigzag is longshore drift, and it is the process that builds spits, moves beaches along a coast, and fills in one side of a groyne while emptying the other. The swash zone is also a habitat in its own right, worked continuously by sanderlings and inhabited by mole crabs and bivalves that ride the water up and burrow in the few seconds before it drains.