Quicksand and Slough: 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 kinds of topographic features.

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

Quicksand
Quicksand entered English in the 14th century as a combination of the adjective quick and the noun sand. The word denotes sand that yields readily to pressure, especially a mass of loose, smooth-grained, water-saturated sand into which heavy objects readily sink.

Quicksand often develops in a hollow at the mouth of a large river, or at the edge of a flat stream where sand mixes with shallow pools of water and where dense material underneath prevents drainage. Bogs have areas where mixtures of sand, mud, and vegetation act like true quicksands.

Figuratively, something that entraps or frustrates is also quicksand (16th century).

Slough
Modern English slough comes from Middle English slough (14th century) and sloghe (14th century), from Old English sloh (before 12th century). The word is akin to Middle Low German slouche ("ditch").

The original meaning of slough is a place of deep mud or mire (c. 900). By the 13th century, the word had already developed a figurative sense still employed: a state of moral degradation or spiritual dejection.

In England slough has continued to be used basically in those senses. A dialectal variant is sloo, from slo, an Old English variant of sloh.

In the United States, however, the word has developed a great many extended senses. They fit into two different clusters of meanings.

One cluster of American uses for slough pertains to marshes: a large marshy place, such as a swamp; a small marshy place isolated in a generally dry area; and a land depression that occasionally becomes marshy.

The other cluster of American slough senses pertains to water: an inlet on a river; a sluggish channel; a small backwater; a bayou; and a creek in a marshland.

These American uses sometimes take the variant forms slew and slue, probably originally from sloo, which English settlers carried with them to the New World during the American colonial period.
____________________________

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.