Definition
nounThe part of Earth which is not covered by oceans or other bodies of water.
nounReal estate or landed property; a partitioned and measurable area which is owned and acquired and on which buildings and structures can be built and erected.
Sentence Examples
Tomorrow, he will land on the moon.
Elephants are the largest land animals alive today.
The new project will reclaim the land from the sea.
Word Origin & History
Etymology tree
Proto-Indo-European *lendʰ-
Proto-Indo-European *-om
Proto-Germanic *landą
Proto-West Germanic *land
Old English land
Middle English lond
English land
From Middle English lond, land, from Old English land, from Proto-West Germanic *land, from Proto-Germanic *landą (“land”), from Proto-Indo-European *lendʰ- (“land, heath”).
Cognates
Cognate with Scots laund (“land”), Yola lhoan, lloan, loan, londe, lone (“land”), North Frisian loun, luin, lun, Lön, lönj, löön (“land”), Saterland Frisian Lound (“land”), West Frisian lân (“land”), Limburgish Land, landj, Laïnt (“land”), Dutch land (“land, country”), Luxembourgish and German Land (“land, country, state”), Vilamovian łaond (“land”), Danish, Elfdalian, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish land (“land, country, shore, territory”). Non-Germanic cognates include Old Irish lann (“heath”), Welsh llan (“enclosure”), Breton lann (“heath”), Old Church Slavonic лѧдо (lędo), from Proto-Slavic *lędo (“heath, wasteland”), French lande (“heath”) and Albanian lëndinë (“heath, grassland”).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Now, assume that the recording is being done with 100 grooves per inch, and that the record groove is .006 inch wide. This means that the land on either side on any given groove in the absence of sound waves is .004 inch."
— 1935, H. Courtney Bryson, The Gramophone Record, page 72:
"her selfe vppon the land / She did prostrate"
— 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto VII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 7:
"The FBI maintains a database, the General Rifling Characteristics (GRC) file, which is organized by caliber, number of lands and grooves, direction of twist, and width of lands and grooves, to help an examiner figure out the origin of a recovered bullet."
— 2008 August 1, Lisa Steele, “Ballistics”, in Eric York Drogin, editor, Science for Lawyers, American Bar Association, page 16:
"The human eye is a precision instrument. It can detect grooves and lands on a slug more efficiently than any computer."
— 2012 November 15, “One Way to Get Off”, in Elementary, season 1, episode 7, spoken by Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller):
"Tatan and Erhtan are two small islands in the sea southwest of Kinmen.[…]A contingent of some 30 Communist troops tried to land at Erhtan, but were disarmed by Government defenders."
— 1981, A Pictorial History of the Republic of China: Its Founding and Development, volume II, Taipei: Modern China Press, →OCLC, page 303, column 1: