A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
landfall
Landfall is the first sighting of land after a passage at sea, and by extension the point where the land is reached. In navigation, it is a specific event with a procedure attached: You aim deliberately to one side of your destination so that when land appears you know which way to turn along it, since arriving with no idea whether you are north or south of the harbor is the worse outcome. The word is also used for the moment a hurricane’s center crosses a coast.
Etymology
The word is a plain English compound from the age of sail and it uses fall in an old sense of coming upon or happening on something, the same sense in befall and in fall in with. To fall in with land was to encounter it. English kept the noun and let the underlying verb sense fade.
Notes
The deliberate offset is called aiming off, and it is the oldest reliable technique in navigation, used at sea, in the air, and on foot. Polynesian navigators expanded a target island by reading the birds, the swell, and the cloud over it, so that a single island effectively became a much wider thing to hit. The same principle is why a walker in fog aims to one side of a gate.