A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1054 entries
veldt
Veldt is open country in southern Africa: grassland and scattered scrub, sorted by altitude into highveld, middleveld, lowveld, and bushveld, each with its own vegetation, rainfall, and grazing season. The word covers the whole of it, and in South African usage it means the country itself as much as any particular vegetation type.
Etymology
The word is Afrikaans and it is simply Dutch for a field. English acquired it in the nineteenth century, spelled it veldt with a silent t on a mistaken analogy with Dutch spelling, and used that form throughout the imperial period. The modern spelling is veld and the older form is now largely confined to writing from before about 1950.
Notes
The subdivisions are working terms rather than scientific ones and they carry real information: lowveld is hot, low, and malarial with a different grass and a different stock calendar from highveld, which is over five thousand feet and gets frost. Fire is built into all of them, and burning on a rotation is standard practice called fire regime.