Landfall

How to spell landfall

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce landfall

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does landfall mean?

1. nounThe arrival at or first sighting of land after a journey by sea or air.
2. nounThe point at which a storm or hurricane moves from the sea onto land.

Landfall in a sentence

• After three weeks at sea, the crew celebrated their first landfall.

• Forecasters warned that the hurricane would make landfall near the coast by morning.

• The captain logged the time of landfall as they approached the harbour.

• Residents boarded up windows ahead of the storm's expected landfall.

Where does landfall come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound, built straightforwardly from the Old English words land, meaning the solid ground or earth, and fall, the noun from the verb meaning to descend or come down. It belongs to the practical vocabulary of sailors, who used it from at least the 1600s to describe the moment a ship first comes within sight of, or actually reaches, the shore after a voyage. The choice of fall is the interesting part: it draws on the older idea of sight or fortune falling upon something, much as we still speak of light falling on an object. Because the word simply joins two everyday roots, both halves keep their plain spelling, which is why the doubled l of fall is the only thing to watch. In modern use the meteorological sense, where a storm or hurricane reaches land, grew naturally out of the same image of something arriving at the coast.

How the word is built

• land (ground, dry earth)
• fall (a coming down, an arrival at), a noun compound originally meaning the falling of sight upon land