Other forms: ponds
A pond is a small patch of still water, small enough to walk round in a minute. Ducks on the village pond, frogspawn in the corner of a garden pond, a green film of weed you push aside with a stick.
The line against lake is size and stillness: a pond is little and shallow enough for plants to grow right across it, and a lake is not. A pond can be dug on purpose — a garden pond, a fish pond, a farm pond for the cattle to drink from — or simply sit where a dip in a field holds the rain. The pond, with the, is a joke name for the Atlantic: he moved across the pond ten years ago. And pond life, said of a person, is a heavy insult meaning the lowest of the low.
1nounpondA small area of still water, smaller than a lake.~98%
“The children fed the ducks at the edge of the pond.”
2nounatlanticThe Atlantic Ocean.~2%
“Her cousins live on the other side of the pond.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
pond is a body of water.
Middle English pond came from an Old English variant of pund, meaning an enclosure — which makes pond a doublet of pound, the same word worn a different way. At root, a pond is water that has been fenced in.
Old English
*pond
Middle English
pond
English, today
pond
Built from
From Middle English pond, ponde (“pond, pool”), probably from Old English pond, pand (attested in placenames), a variant of pund (“enclosure”). a doublet of pound.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA