Formation

Ponds can result from a wide range of natural processes, although in many parts of the world these are now severely constrained by human activity. Any depression in the ground which collects and retains a sufficient amount of precipitation can be considered a pond, and such depressions can be formed by a variety of geological and ecological events.

In origin, 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 man-made 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 (40,000 m²). 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.

Regional differences include the use of the word pond in New England, and Maine in particular, for relatively large water bodies. For example a Great Pond in Maine is considered to be at least 10 acres (41,240 m²) in area.

In areas which were covered by glaciers in the past, some ponds were created when the glaciers retreated. These ponds are known as kettle ponds, although larger occurrences are called kettle lakes or pothole lakes or simply kettle holes. Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, is a well known example of a kettle hole. Kettle ponds are often deep and clean because they are fed by underground aquifers rather than surface streams.

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.

The word “pond” is sometimes also used to refer to the Atlantic Ocean in the expression “across the pond”, and the expression “big pond” similarly is sometimes used for the Pacific. These uses are deliberate idiomatic understatements.

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