Estuary

How to spell estuary

7 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce estuary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does estuary mean?

1. nounThe tidal mouth of a large river, where fresh river water mixes with salt water from the sea.

Estuary in a sentence

• The wildlife trust manages the mudflats along the estuary.

• Salmon gather near the mouth of the estuary before swimming upstream.

Where does estuary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin aestuarium, meaning a tidal inlet or marsh, which was built on aestus, a noun that meant 'tide', 'surge', or even 'boiling heat'. The underlying image is of water in agitated, surging motion, the way the sea rises and churns against the mouth of a river. English took the word up in the late 1500s, by which point it described precisely the place where a river meets the tide of the sea and the two waters mix. The same aestus root also lies behind the much rarer English word 'estuate', meaning to surge or boil, and it is distantly connected to the idea of heat seen in Latin descriptions of summer. The tricky spelling, with its unstressed '-uary' ending, traces straight back to that Latin aestuarium, which helps explain why the 'u' is so easy to drop when writing it quickly.

How the word is built

• estu- (from Latin aestus: tide, surge, boiling)
• -ary (suffix marking a place)