A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
haze
Haze is a reduction in visibility caused by fine dry particles suspended in the air, which is what separates it from fog and mist, where the particles are water. Haze whitens distance, softens contrast, and shifts far ridges toward blue. The particles come from dust, salt, smoke, pollen, and the fine aerosols that forest gives off, and a summer haze over a wooded range is largely made by the trees below it.
Etymology
The origin of the word is not established. It appears in English in the seventeenth century, with the adjective hazy recorded a little earlier as a sailor’s term, and no earlier form has been found. It is one of a group of common English weather words that arrived without a traceable parent, which is unusual for a language this well documented.
Notes
The blue on distant ridges is haze doing the same thing the sky does, scattering short wavelengths back toward the eye out of the intervening air. The Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains are both named for it, and in the Smokies a large share of the haze is produced by volatile compounds released by the forest itself, which react in sunlight and form fine particles.