A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
pelagic
Pelagic means of the open water: the whole volume of the sea away from the bottom and away from the shore. A pelagic fish lives in the water column rather than on the seabed, a pelagic bird spends its life at sea and comes to land only to breed, and a pelagic trip is a boat run out past the shelf edge to find them. The counterpart is benthic, meaning of the bottom.
Etymology
The word is Greek for of the open sea, built on the Greek word for the sea itself. That word is the source of the name Pelasgians, an old term for the peoples the Greeks believed had been in Greece before them, and it has no relationship to the other Greek word for sea that gives thalassic.
Notes
The pelagic realm is subdivided by depth in a scheme that runs from the sunlit epipelagic down through the mesopelagic twilight zone, the bathypelagic where no light reaches at all, the abyssopelagic, and finally the hadal zone in the trenches. It is by a very large margin the biggest living space on the planet and most of it has never been visited.