Coastline

How to spell coastline

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce coastline

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does coastline mean?

1. nounThe outline or shape of a coast, where the land meets the sea.

Coastline in a sentence

• The rugged coastline stretched for miles beneath the cliffs.

• Developers were barred from building along the protected coastline.

Where does coastline come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a transparent English compound, joining 'coast' and 'line'. The first element, 'coast', came into Middle English through Old French 'coste', which traced back to the Latin 'costa', meaning 'rib' or 'side'; from the idea of a side, it shifted to mean the side or edge of the land where it meets the sea. The second element, 'line', also reaches back to Latin, to 'linea', meaning a string of flax or a drawn line, from 'linum' for 'flax'. The compound itself is relatively modern, recorded from around the early nineteenth century to describe the outline of a shore as seen on a map or chart. Because both halves are familiar everyday words, the spelling is easy to assemble once you remember it is written as a single solid word with no space and no hyphen.

How the word is built

• coast (shore where land meets sea)
• line (boundary, outline)