A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1039 entries
blaze
A mark cut or painted on a tree to show a route — originally a chip of bark taken off with an axe to expose the pale wood beneath, now more often a rectangle of paint. Also, on an animal, the white stripe running down the face of a horse or a cow. The two senses are the same idea: a light patch deliberately visible against a dark ground.
Etymology
This is not the blaze that means fire. That one is Old English blæse, a torch. The trail-mark word comes from a Germanic term for a white mark or spot, related to Old Norse blesi and Middle Low German bles, and it entered English by way of the animal marking — a horse with a blaze — before it was ever applied to a tree.
Notes
Blaze conventions carry information beyond direction. Two blazes stacked usually mean a turn ahead, and the offset of the upper one gives the side. The Appalachian Trail is a single white rectangle, its side trails blue. In some old surveys, a triple blaze marked a boundary or a corner, and lines of them can still be found grown over in second-growth wood.