A wideestuary formed as alagoon at the mouth of one or more rivers, where flow is constrained by a bar of sediments (created by either the current of a sea or a sediment-saturated river), especially in the Black Sea region.
1918, Stephen Rudnicki,Ukraine, the Land and Its People: An Introduction to Its Geography, page19:
Only at a point where a river, a streamlet, even a balka (step-glen, ravine) opens into the sea, is the steep incline of the steppe-plateau broken.[…] This sea-water lake is called liman in Ukrainian. Wherever a stream of great volume empties into aliman, the bar is severed at one or more places.
1993 December 15, Danylo Husar Struk,Encyclopedia of Ukraine: Volume V: St-Z, University of Toronto Press,→ISBN:
Its rising provided conditions for the formation ofliman valleys along the coast. As well, meltwaters from the ice cap produced ponding, with excess water that either spilled over the low points of divides or flowed along the ice[…]
2016 September 28, Ruben Kosyan,The Diversity of Russian Estuaries and Lagoons Exposed to Human Influence, Springer,→ISBN, page123:
Fig.5.12 The Akhtanizovskyliman delta arm […] certainlimans, particularly those fed by river water, continued to decline naturally, whereas the square area of swamps, contrastingly, continued to increase. The first significant anthropogenic changes in the size and natural regime of thelimans and flooded areas were initially connected with artificial changes in flow direction[…]
Because liman mud was sometimes used therapeutically, some English dictionaries beginning in the 1870s have incorrectly definedlimanasalluvial (estuarine/deltal) slime rather than the estuary itself that deposits the slime, sometimes deriving the word from Frenchlimon(“silt”) rather than from Russian/Ukrainian; this is aghost sense.
^Turgood, Graham (1999)Ancient Cham to Modern Dialects: Two Thousand Years of Language Contact and Change, Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press,→ISBN, pages156, 340
Wilkinson, Richard James.An Abridged Malay-English Dictionary. Macmillan. 1965.
Wilkinson, Richard James (1901) “ليمن leman”, inA Malay-English dictionary, Hong Kong: Kelly & Walsh limited, page629
Wilkinson, Richard James (1932) “liman”, inA Malay-English dictionary (romanised), volume II, Mytilene, Greece: Salavopoulos & Kinderlis, page58
