Veld

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /vɛlt/

Definitions

1. open grassland or savanna landscape in southern Africa
2. expansive grassy terrain with scattered vegetation characteristic of South African regions
3. wide uncultivated grassland terrain found across southern African plains

Etymology: The word arrived in English from South African Dutch settlers, who used it for the wide, treeless grasslands they found at the Cape. It was borrowed from Afrikaans, which descends from Dutch, where "veld" meant "field" or "open country." Those Dutch-speaking colonists were describing land that looked, to them, much like the fields of home, only far larger and emptier. Its deeper ancestry is ordinary Germanic. "Veld" traces back to a Proto-Germanic word for "field" or "plain," and that same root gave English "field." The two are doublets, separate descendants of one ancestor that reached English by different routes, one through the Low Countries and the other through the ordinary development of Old English.

Synonyms: grassland, savanna