Origins of terms
The word shore comes from the middle English word Schöre that came from the middle low German word Schöre. Shore is also an archaic past tense and past participle of shear. In the German language, the verb shear is scheren (Betteridge, 1965). Schere (or shear) means shearing, cutting, or a point of division. Thus, the middle English and low German schöre translates as the sheared line (or shoreline) between the ocean and the land. In the German language, schöre is a line and not a region. However, the English usage of shore (from schöre) became a description of the area adjacent to a body of water. Webster’s unabridged dictionary defines shore as “land at or near the edge of a body of water” (McKechnie, 1979). The term shoreline is used to describe the line marking the edge of a body of water.
The German language actually uses a different word to describe the strip of land adjacent to a body of water. The German word uferis used for bank, shore, beach, or edge. Thus,...
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Bibliography
Betteridge, H.T., 1965. The New Cassell’s German Dictionary. New York: Funk and Wagnalls.
McKechnie, J.L., (ed.), 1979. Webster’s New Unabridged Dictionary. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Oertel, G.F., Ludwick, J.C., and Oertel, D.L.S., 1989. Sand accounting methodology for barrier island sediment budget analysis. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium on Coastal and Ocean Management. Charleston, SC, pp. 43–61.
Cross-references
Beach Processes
Coastal Changes, Rapia
Changing Sea Levels
Littoral Cells
Mapping Shores and Coastal Terrain
Remote Sensing of Coastal Environments
Sediment Transport (see Cross-Shore Sediment Transport and Longshore Sediment Transport)
Tides
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Oertel, G.F. (2005). Coasts, Coastlines, Shores, and Shorelines. In: Schwartz, M.L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Coastal Science. Encyclopedia of Earth Science Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3880-1_94
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