A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
holdfast
A holdfast is the structure that anchors a seaweed to rock. In the big kelps, it is a mass of branching, interlocking fingers called haptera that grow into and around every irregularity in the stone. Kelp torn loose in a storm usually breaks somewhere above the holdfast rather than at it.
Etymology
It’s plain English compound that came out of ordinary usage, where a holdfast was any clamp, hook, or staple that fixed one thing to another. Some carpenters still use the word for a bench clamp. Fast is the older English sense of firmly fixed, the same one in fast-ice.