pond / pound

19 June 2026

A pond is a small body of water. The word is actually a spelling and pronunciation variant of the noun pound, meaning of a pen or enclosure. The word probably comes from an unattested Old English *pund. We also find cognates in the Anglo-Norman ponde, punde, attested to as a family name in the twelfth century and as a noun in the fourteenth, and in the Anglo-Latin pundum and pundfalda starting in the thirteenth century.

Both the Anglo-Norman and the Anglo-Latin cognates are likely borrowings from English, although it’s possible the Anglo-Norman comes from a shared Germanic root. (Norman French has a considerable number of words from Germanic, in addition to the usual Latin roots.)

The original pounds were enclosures for animals, but in later use the meaning was extended to include prisons—that is enclosures for people—and more recently enclosures for vehicles.

We have a record of the word from a twelfth century charter that outlines the boundaries of the land owned by Abingdon Abbey, in what is now Oxfordshire, England. It appears in the compound pund fald, that is the present-day pinfold:

Of þam pytte on haccan pund fald, of haccan pund falde oþ eft on þæt efer fearn

(From that pit to the pinfold fence, from the pinfold fence to once again the efer-ferns.)

The shift to the pond spelling occurred in Middle English. The letter <o> appears to have been added because the back-to-back <u> and <n> invited confusion in the number of minims required to write the letters. In later Middle English the spelling either represented or engendered a pronunciation change, the shortening of the vowel sound.

In the thirteenth century the word is recorded in the sense of  a pool or other small body of water, that is an enclosure that holds water. An early attestation of this sense is in thirteenth-century romance King Horn:

My net hys ney honde
In a wel fayr ponde
Hyt hat hy be here
Al þis seue ȝere

(My net lies near to hand
In a very fair pond
It has lain here
All these seven years.)

While ponds are usually small, there is also the jocular use of pond to refer to the ocean, particularly the Atlantic Ocean. Here is an early example from Joseph Hall’s 1612 Contemplations vpon the Principall Passages of the Holy Storie:

From thence, if wee goe downe to the great deepe, the wombe of moisture, the well of fountaines, the great pond of the world; wee know not whether to wonder at the Element it selfe, or the guests which it containes.

The use in this passage is not so much for humorous effect as it is an example of litotes or understatement. We see a more directly humorous application, and one referring specifically to the Atlantic, in the poem Mary Cay, published in a Tory newspaper, New York’s Royal Gazette of 22 January 1780, during the American Revolution:

IV. For Molly counted full thirteen,
   And bundled now with Sammy,
Who said she ought to be a Queen,
   And never mind her Mammy.
V. So Sam an[d] Moll together plot,
   To make a stout resistance,
And from the school, in short, they got
   Some truants for assistants.
VI. Then mother call’d for Dick and Will
   To teach the wench her duty,
They drubb’d her now and then, but still
   They coax’d her as a beauty.
Then Jack was sent across the Pond,
   To take her in the rear, Sir,
But Dick and Will did both abscond—
   We thought it mighty queer, Sir!

In the poem, Molly represents the thirteen states, née colonies; the mother is, of course, England; Dick and Will are the British military commanders, brothers Admiral Richard Howe and General William Howe; and Jack is the prototypical Royal Navy sailor. One is tempted to assign Sam the identity of Uncle Sam, but it is more likely a reference to the revolutionary leader Sam Adams.

Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 Phase 4, 2013–17, s.v. ponde, n.

Hall, Joseph. Contemplations vpon the Principall Passages of the Holy Storie. London: M Bradwood for Sa. Macham, 1612, 20. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Hall, Joseph, ed. King Horn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901, lines 1172–75. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. (Not the same Joseph Hall)

“Mary Cay.” Royal Gazette (New York), 22 January 1780, 3/3–4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Middle English Dictionary, 31 January 2026, s.v. pound(e, n.2.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, December 2006, s.v. pond, n., pound n.2.; June 2006, s.v. pinfold, n.

Photo credit: Dave Wilton, 2021. Licensable under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.