Answer: There are no official definitions for generic terms as applied
to geographic names. Every organization will have a definition that is application
driven, and no one office definition is accepted as official. The difference
is thematic and beyond that it is highly perceptive. The difference between
lake and pond is an example. We, at the USGS Geographic Names Office, in developing
the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) database, have devised 63 broad
categories of feature types with definitions solely to facilitate retrieval
of entries with similar characteristics. So, we define lake as “natural
body of inland water,” and not necessarily applicable to another’s
needs. We have found 54 different generic terms that have characteristics similar
to our definition of lake, but all are classified as lake. The only area of
general agreement is that perceptibly, a pond is smaller than a lake, but even
this is not always true.
We classify all “linear flowing bodies of water” as stream,
a rather neutral term for our use. There are presently 121 generic terms
that fit our broad category stream. As another example, many perceptibly
insist that a creek must flow into a river. Such hierarchies do not exist
in the Nation's namescape as evidenced by Little River flowing into Goose
Creek nearby to our offices here in Northern Virginia. Many controversies
exist, such as mountain/hill, which we call summit (as are 194 other generic
terms applied to features with similar characteristics), and city/town
that we classify as populated place, etc. It might be of interest that
the British Ordnance Survey once defined a mountain as having 1,000 feet
of elevation, and less was a hill, but this was abandoned sometime in
the 1920's we believe. There was even a movie with this as its theme in
the late 1990's - The Englishman That Went Up a Hill and Down a Mountain.
The U.S. Board on Geographic Names once stated that the difference between
a hill and a mountain in the U.S. was 1,000 feet of local relief, but
even this was abandoned in the early 1970's. For more information contact
the GNIS Manager. |
