Kettle, Moss, Muskeg: Origins, Forms, Histories of Words Meaning Marsh, Swamp

The natural features of a region are its topography (Greek topos, "place"). Marshes, swamps, and related areas are important examples of topographic features.

In the current alphabetic series of terms that refer to such places, here are the origins, forms, and histories of kettle, kettle hole, moss, and muskeg. The dates of forms and meanings come from the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

Kettle
Modern English kettle (16th century) comes from Middle English ketel (13th century), from Old Norse ketill (akin to Old English cietel, "kettle"). Both the Middle English word and the Old Norse word come from a prehistoric Germanic form borrowed from Latin catillus, diminutive of catinus ("bowl").

The original meaning of kettle is a usually pot-shaped, or rounded, vessel for boiling liquids (13th century).

Any of various similarly shaped water-related natural features is also known as a kettle (19th century). In general, any fairly large, rounded land depression that is often filled with water may be called a kettle (also known as a pothole). More specifically, a kettle, or a kettle hole, is a steep-sided marshy hollow without surface drainage, scoured out of a rocky river bed or especially in a deposit of glacial drift.

Moss
Modern English moss comes from Middle English moss (14th century), from Old English mos (before 12th century). The word is akin to Old High German mos ("moss, swamp"), Old Norse mosi ("moss, swamp"), and Latin muscus ("moss").

In Scottish and northern England dialects, a moss is a swamp or a bog, especially a peat bog (975). The word is often used in the plural with the, as in "the mosses at the Scottish-English border."

In general English usage, the word moss refers to any of a class (Musci) of small leafy plants (14th century), some of which form the characteristic vegetation of land mosses, that is, bogs.

Muskeg
The English word muskeg comes from Cree (an Algonquian language in Canada) maskerk.

A muskeg (1806) is a bog in northern North America, especially a sphagnum bog covered with compact tufts forming a thick mossy crust. More broadly, any thick deposit of partially decayed vegetable matter characteristic of wet northern regions is a muskeg.
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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.