floodwater

nounB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,410 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: floodwaters

Floodwater is water covering land it does not usually reach. Rising floodwater, wade through floodwater, floodwater damage.

It is dangerous out of proportion to its depth, since a foot of moving water will take a car and it hides everything beneath it. It is also contaminated by sewage almost every time, which is why the clean-up is what costs.

Definitions of floodwater

1nounfloodwaterWater covering land it does not usually reach.B2+
“After the storm, brown floodwater filled the ground floors of the houses along the river.”

floodwater is a water.

Where it comes from

Flood plus water, from Old English flod, a flowing or a deluge, with the compound in use since the sixteenth century.

From flood + water.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Nature & Weather

Practise this word

floodwater in the wild

In January 2018 one of the bridge's stone parapets collapsed, undermined by floodwater, but the arches remained undamaged.
Wool, Dorset
As this reduces the channel floodwater capacity, the creek will, over time, seek new, lower paths, forming a meander (a curved path).
Alluvial plain
Due to the limited capacity of the reservoir, large spills of floodwater often occur after large rain storms.
Lake Kaweah
Mitchell provides a detailed map of the area depicting the extent of floodwater in the winter of 1848.
West Lancashire Coastal Plain
The area of floodwater was found to be 7.6 square miles, considerably more than Windermere at the time.
West Lancashire Coastal Plain

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

← Vocabulary