A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
brine
Water carrying more salt than seawater does. It forms wherever water leaves and salt cannot — in a drying lagoon, in a salt pan, in the veins between ice crystals as sea ice freezes. Because it is denser than the water around it, brine sinks, and on the deep sea floor it can pool into brine lakes with a visible shoreline and a surface that ripples, a body of water lying inside a body of water.
Etymology
Old English brȳne, salt water, and after that the record simply stops. It is confined to the western Germanic languages — Dutch brijn, Low German brine — with no established relatives beyond, which suggests it may have been picked up from a language that left nothing else behind. A word this old and this basic usually has cousins everywhere. This one does not, and nobody has explained why.