étangn.

a1855 C. Brontë Professor (1857) II. xxi. 109 Near it [sc. a place of public resort in the outskirts of Brussels] were several of those lakelets called étangs; and there was one étang, larger than the rest, where..people were accustomed to amuse themselves by rowing round it.

1879 Encycl. Brit. X. 265/2 The dunes travel inland in parallel, irregular, and often confluent ridges, between which rain-water is sometimes arrested to form pools (étangs of the French coasts), where formations of peat occasionally take place.

1940 M. Sadleir Fanny by Gaslight 10 One of the several solitary and reed-grown étangs which occur..in the forest above Les Yvelines.

1960 W. W. Williams Coastal Changes ii. 38 Probably the most important effect of eustatic and isostatic movements..is the part that they play in the formation of many coastal features, notably..bars like those which lie between the étangs and the sea in the South of France.

1969 Daily Tel. 10 Jan. (Colour Suppl.) 32/1 There is a bit of French Provincial between Nantes and Bordeaux, which soon fades into the bleak pine barren of Landes and the sinister étangs of the sandy wastes to the south.