Plash, Playa, Plunge: 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 types of topographic features.

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

Plash
Modern English plash comes from Middle English plash (15th century) and plasche (15th century), from Old English plaesc (before 12th century). The word is akin to Middle Dutch plasch ("pool, plash"). Both the English and the Dutch words probably originated as imitations of the splashing sound of water.

A plash is any of the following: a shallow piece of standing water, a small pool made by a flood or a rain, a marshy pool, or a puddle (10th century).

Playa
The English word playa was adopted in the 19th century from Spanish playa ("playa," literally "beach"), from Late Latin plagia ("shoreline, beach"), from Greek plagia ("sides, flanks"), from the neuter plural of plagios ("oblique"). The word is akin to Greek pelagos ("sea").

A playa (1854) is a flat-bottomed, undrained land depression that becomes at times a shallow lake. Playas develop in interior desert areas and along the coasts of arid and semiarid regions.

The water that periodically covers a playa slowly filters into the groundwater system or evaporates into the air. The filtering and evaporating processes create deposits of salt, sand, and mud along the bottom and around the edges of the playa.

Plunge
The noun plunge evolved in the 15th century from the verb plunge (14th century), from Middle French plonger, from (assumed) Vulgar Latin plumbicare, from Latin plumbum ("lead").

A place where one plunges or may plunge is a plunge. In the early 15th century, the word plunge was already being used in this sense to refer to a natural deep pool or to any deep place in a natural body of water. Eventually plunge, originally plunge bath, also came to denote an artificial imitation of such a place, that is, a swimming pool (19th century).
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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.