A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
voe
A voe is a narrow inlet of the sea in Shetland and Orkney, sheltered, often long and thin, and running well into the land. Voes are the working harbors and the settled ground of those islands, since almost everything in Shetland is built around one and the coastline is so indented with them that no point in the archipelago is more than three miles from the sea.
Etymology
The word came into Scots from Norse and it is the same word that gives English fjord, Scots firth, and Swedish fjard. English has taken this one Norse root at least four times by different routes and each borrowing landed on a different kind of inlet, which is a fair demonstration of how a word specializes when a language already has one.
Notes
Sullom Voe is the largest and gave its name to the oil terminal built at its head in the 1970s, which was sited there for exactly the reason the Norse settled the voes in the first place: deep sheltered water with a short approach. The word appears throughout Shetland place names and is still the ordinary local term rather than an antiquarian one.