Groundwater

How to spell groundwater

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce groundwater

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does groundwater mean?

1. nounWater held underground in the soil and in the spaces and cracks of rock, supplying wells and springs.

Groundwater in a sentence

• The factory was fined for letting chemicals seep into the groundwater.

• Local farmers rely on groundwater pumped from deep wells during the dry season.

Where does groundwater come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound built from two of the oldest words in the language. 'Ground' descends from the Old English 'grund', which meant the bottom or foundation of something, including the bed of the sea, and it has close cousins across the Germanic family such as the German 'Grund'. 'Water' comes from the Old English 'waeter', again with Germanic relatives like the German 'Wasser' and the Dutch 'water'. The two were joined to name the water that collects beneath the surface of the land, filling the spaces in soil and rock. The compound is comparatively modern as a technical term, gaining currency in geology and hydrology during the nineteenth century, though both of its parts are Anglo-Saxon to the core. Because it is a single closed word, the only real spelling decision is to resist the urge to split it into 'ground water'.

How the word is built

• ground (the solid surface of the earth)
• water (liquid H2O), a closed compound noun