Mouth, Oxbow, Oxbow Lake: Origins, Forms, Histories of Words Meaning River, Lake

The natural features of a region are its topography (Greek topos, "place"). Rivers, lakes, and related freshwater bodies are important examples of topographic features.

In the current alphabetic series of words that name such freshwater features, here are the origins, forms, and histories of mouth, oxbow, and oxbow lake. The dates of forms and meanings come from the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

Mouth
Modern English mouth comes from Middle English mouth (13th century), from Old English muth (before 12th century). The word is akin to Old High German mund ("mouth").

The original meaning of mouth is the opening for taking in food by an animal (before 12th century). The word has also been extended to apply to anything resembling such a mouth.

Since at least the 12th century, mouth has denoted any of various topographic features that form an opening, either on land, such as an entrance to a valley, or in water, such as the place where a stream enters a larger body of water.

Oxbow, Oxbow Lake
Oxbow emerged in the 14th century as a combination of ox ("ox," the animal) and bow ("something bent into a curve").

The original meaning of oxbow is a U-shaped frame forming a collar about an ox's neck and supporting the yoke (14th century).

Anything resembling the shape of such a collar is also called an oxbow. In the world of waterways, an oxbow is a bend-especially an extreme, semicircular curve-in a river or stream (18th century).

Such a curvature (also known as a meander) often leaves only a thin neck of land between the two parts of the stream. If the stream cuts through that strip of land to shorten its course and then blocks off the old bend by depositing sediment, the former loop becomes a separate body of water called an oxbow lake.

An isolated oxbow lake has a distinctly crescent shape. However, two or more oxbow lakes in close succession-a frequent occurrence in meandering rivers-will form a larger oxbow lake with a serpentine (winding) shape.

Oxbow lakes usually silt up to form marshes and eventually dry up to become meander scars.
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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.