Word Origins of Backshore, Basin, Bay, Bayou - Coastal Features, Processes

In the current alphabetic series of terms relating to coastal features and processes, here are backshore, basin, bay, and bayou.

Backshore
A backshore is that part of a seashore covered by water only during powerful storms. It lies between the foreshore (the area ranging from high-water to low-water marks) and the coastline.

Basin
The Modern English word basin comes from Middle English basin, from Old French bacin, from Late Latin bacchinon.

As a coastal feature, a basin is a water area enclosed or partly enclosed by land and suitable for the anchorage of ships. The term is usually applied to a little bay or a small landlocked harbor.

In some cases, however, the word basin refers to a body of water of considerable size. For example, the Minas Basin, an inlet of the Bay of Fundy, itself an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia, is up to 25 miles wide and stretches more than 50 miles long. The basin has some of the highest tides in the world, with fluctuations of more than 50 feet.

Bay
The Modern English coast-related word bay comes from Middle English baye, from Middle French baie, which probably goes back to the Old French verb baer ("to be open").

A bay is an inlet of a sea, often semicircular or nearly circular, that is similar to a gulf but usually smaller.

Bays range in size from a few hundred yards to several hundred miles in width. They tend to form in areas where easily eroded rocks, such as clays and sandstones, wear away, leaving a border of harder rocks, such as granite and limestone.

Famous bays include the Bay of Biscay, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean along the coasts of France and Spain; Chesapeake Bay, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean along the coasts of Maryland and Virginia; San Francisco Bay, a nearly landlocked bay connected to the Pacific Ocean by the Golden Gate Strait; Tampa Bay, an inlet of the Gulf of Mexico along western Florida; and Tokyo Bay, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean in Japan.

Bayou
Bayou originated as a Louisiana French word, an adaptation of Choctaw bayuk.

The word bayou has a wide range of applications, referring to any of various usually marshy or sluggish bodies of water. Along a coast, such waterways include an outlet for a coastal swamp, a creek or inlet at an estuary (where a sea meets a river), and a bay or a lagoon in a sea marsh.
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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.