Word of the Day

Brought to you by Vocab Vitamins

Today's Word: muskeg

This week's theme: Scrabble-friendly swamps.

muskeg

(noun) [MUS-keg']

1. an area of swamp or boggy land covered in moss, leaves, and decayed matter resembling peat: "Kira emerged from her room like a creature from a muskeg, in the best Halloween costume I have ever seen."

also: maskeg

Origin

Approximately 1775; from Cree (language of American Indian people of the same name from a vast area of central Canada), 'maskek': grassy bog.

S p o n s o r e d   L i n k [Buy a text ad here]
Daily health and fitness tips
Starling Fitness - Health and Fitness weblog by Laura Moncur

In Action

"Signs of brown bears appeared regularly: piles of scat full of berry seeds; tufts of fur stuck in bark; and long, raking claw marks on a downed hemlock. I crossed a muskeg bog, stepping in the holes left by bear paws coming down in exactly the same place, year after year. A full-grown brown bear can weigh more than half a ton. My boots fit into their pie-tin-size prints with room to spare.

The bear trail led us into a grove where some of the trees stood as tall as 20-story buildings. The biggest ones would have been imposing when Christopher Columbus first laid eyes on the New World. The trees stood like columns in a grand cathedral, holding up the sky itself. The area under their canopy was open and airy, carpeted by ferns, moss and the four-petaled, white blooms of bunchberry dogwood."

Chris Welsch. "Tongass forest: One of nation's last great stands," Minneapolis Star-tribune (May 28, 2006).

"Hundreds of shorebirds representing at least a dozen species revealed themselves at the Great Meadows Marsh on Sunday, foraging in loose flocks, flying low over the marsh, wheeling, calling to one another. The scene was beautiful and bittersweet: Many of the species simply pop by each spring and fall on their way to breeding grounds in Canada's boreal forests, muskeg and tundra."

Peter Davenport. "Seeing shorebirds in marsh was a safe bet," Stamford Advocate (May 25, 2006).

"The bid represents a 27 per cent premium on the closing price of BlackRock shares last week, but the stock has soared amid the frenzied activity by energy investors in Alberta's muskeg wilderness.

Oil companies are flocking to the Canadian province, enticed by the huge resource, reckoned by some to be as large as Saudi Arabia.

Oil or tar sands were once dismissed as too expensive an alternative to conventional crude oil, but the high oil price has removed the major hurdle to investment, turning Fort McMurray in northern Alberta into a boom town."

Carl Mortished. "Shell pays £1.1bn for Canada sands firm," [UK] Sunday Times (May 9, 2006).

Get a Word a Day by Email - Sign up Today!