A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
holdfast
A holdfast is the structure that anchors a seaweed to rock. It is not a root and takes up nothing; its only job is to grip, and it does that against surf that would move a car. In the big kelps, it is a mass of branching, interlocking fingers called haptera that grow into and around every irregularity in the stone, and a kelp torn loose in a storm usually breaks somewhere above the holdfast rather than at it.
Etymology
The word is a plain English compound and it says what the thing does. It came out of ordinary usage, where a holdfast was any clamp, hook, or staple that fixed one thing to another, and carpenters still use the word for a bench clamp. Botanists borrowed the workshop term. Fast is the older English sense of firmly fixed, the same one in fast-ice.