A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
driftwood
Driftwood is wood that has traveled by water and come ashore, worn smooth, stripped of bark, bleached silver, and often bored through by shipworm. It arrives as single logs and as rafts of hundreds. On a river it builds jams that redirect the channel and create pools; on a beach it builds the berm that dunes then form on top of.
Etymology
The word is a plain English compound and it uses drift in its oldest sense, meaning the action of being driven, from the same root as drive. That older sense survives in several places that no longer look connected: a snowdrift is snow that was driven, a drift net drifts with the current, and cattle were once driven along a drift road.
Notes
The far north ran on driftwood. Iceland and Greenland have almost no forest, and Norse settlers built with logs that had come out of the Siberian rivers, crossed the Arctic Ocean in the ice, and landed on their beaches years later. Driftwood rights were legally defined and valuable, and Icelandic farms still hold them. Tree rings in beach driftwood are now used to work out where the logs originated and how the sea ice moved.