page_title: Pond
section_title: Nomenclature
hierarchical_section_title: Pond / Nomenclature
caption_attribution_description: A pond in Swarzynice, Poland
context_page_description: A pond is an area filled with water, either natural or artificial, that is smaller than a lake. It may arise naturally in floodplains as part of a river system, or be a somewhat isolated depression. It may contain shallow water with aquatic plants and animals.
  Factors that affect the type of life found in a pond include depth and duration of water level, nutrients, shade, presence or absence of inlets and outlets, effects of grazing animals, and salinity.
  Ponds are frequently man-made, or expanded beyond their original depth and bounds. Among their many uses, ponds provide water for agriculture and livestock, aid in habitat restoration, serve as fish hatcheries, are components of landscape architecture, may store thermal energy as solar ponds, and treat wastewater as treatment ponds.
  Ponds may be freshwater, saltwater, or brackish.
context_section_description: In origin, a pond is a variant form of the word pound, meaning a confining enclosure. As straying cattle are enclosed in a pound so water is enclosed in a pond. In earlier times, ponds were artificial and utilitarian, as stew ponds, mill ponds and so on. The significance of this feature seems, in some cases, to have been lost when the word was carried abroad with emigrants. In the United States, natural pools are often called ponds.  Ponds for a specific purpose keep the adjective, such as "stock pond", used for watering livestock.
  Pond usually implies a quite small body of water, generally smaller than one would require a boat to cross. Another definition is that a pond is a body of water where even its deepest areas are reached by sunlight or where a human can walk across the entire body of water without being submerged. In some dialects of English, pond normally refers to small artificially created bodies of water.
  Some regions of the United States define a pond as a body of water with a surface area of less than 10 acres (4.0 ha).  Minnesota, known as the "land of 10,000 lakes", is commonly said to distinguish lakes from ponds, bogs and other water features by this definition, but also says that a lake is distinguished primarily by wave action reaching the shore.
  The term is also used for temporary accumulation of water from surface runoff (ponded water).
  There are various regional names for naturally occurring ponds. In Scotland, one of the terms is lochan, which may also apply to a large body of water such as a lake. In North American prairies, they may be termed playas.
caption: A pond in Swarzynice, Poland
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