A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
fjard
A fjard is a glacially carved coastal inlet in country with little relief, so it has none of the walls that make a fjord dramatic. Fjards are shallow, irregular, and full of islands, skerries, and shoals, with low rocky or wooded shores and a shoreline that branches in every direction. The coasts of Sweden, Finland, Maine, and eastern Canada are fjard coasts.
Etymology
The word is Swedish, and it is the same word as fjord, taken into English separately to name the low-relief version. English has borrowed this one Norse root at least four times, arriving at fjord, fjard, firth in Scotland, and voe in Shetland, and each borrowing landed on a slightly different kind of inlet.
Notes
The difference between a fjard and a fjord is what the ice had to work with. The same glacier over hard rock with high relief cuts a deep-walled trench, and over low ground it scours a shallow maze. Maine’s island-studded coast and the Stockholm archipelago are the same landform on two continents.