Hot Spring, Inlet, Inundation: Origins, Forms, Histories of Words Meaning River, Lake

The natural features of a region are its topography (Greek topos, "place").

Among the most important topographic features of a region are its rivers, lakes, and other freshwater bodies. Many terms relating to freshwater features have little-known meanings and/or colorful etymologies.

In the current alphabetic series of such words, here are the origins, forms, and histories of hot spring, inlet, and inundation. The dates of forms and meanings come from the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

Hot Spring
A hot spring (1669) is a spring that issues water at a temperature substantially higher than that of its surroundings. It is also known as a thermal spring.

Most hot springs result from the interaction of groundwater with magma (molten rock material within the earth) or with hot igneous rocks formed by solidification of magma. However, some hot springs are believed to result from the deep circulation of water to the lower parts of the earth's crust, where the temperature of the rocks is high and where the water is heated before rising to the surface and emerging in hot springs.

Inlet
The word inlet evolved in the late 13th and early 14th centuries from a combination of the adverb in and the verb let. It was a modified form of the verb let in.

From that early period to about the 17th century, the verb inlet (originally two words) meant to let in, to allow to enter (now obsolete). During that same time, the noun inlet meant an admission, an act of letting in (a sense still sometimes used).

In the late 16th century (c. 1576), the noun came to be applied to various water-related topographic features having one important element in common: they let water in. The name inlet commonly denotes any of three types of such features.

(1) A bay or recess in the shore of a river, a lake, or a sea.

(2) A waterway into a river, a lake, or a sea.

(3) A narrow water passage between peninsulas or through a barrier island or barrier reef to a bay or lagoon.

Inundation
Inundation entered Middle English in the 15th century from Latin inundation-, a combining form of inundatio, from inundatus, the past participle of inundare ("to flood"), from in- ("in, toward, on") and undare ("to rise in waves"), ultimately based on unda ("wave").

A rising and spreading of water over land usually dry is an inundation (1432-50).
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Encyclopaedia Britannica Ready Reference 2004. CD-ROM. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2004.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. 11th ed. Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 2006.

Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary. 3rd ed. Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 2007.

The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1989.