A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
billabong
In Australia, a pool or channel left behind when a river shifts its course or a flood recedes — often a cut-off bend, holding water long after the surrounding country has dried. Elsewhere, the same landform is an oxbow lake, but the Australian word covers more ground: a dead-end channel, a backwater, a creek bed that only runs after rain.
Etymology
From Wiradjuri, the language of a large area of inland New South Wales, where bilabang is built on bila, river. The second element is read two ways: as bang, continuing in time or space, or as bung, dead. Either reading describes the thing — the river continuing where the river is no longer, or the arm of it that has stopped.