Q: This kind of construction always puzzles me: “He built his home on the banks of the Ohio River.” Can the plural “banks” refer to the land on just one side of a river?
A: Both the singular “bank” and the plural “banks” have been used for hundreds of years to mean the entire raised area of land along a river, lake, sea, or other water body. The singular, often modified by an adjective like “left” or “west,” is also used for a specific side or part of the raised area.
When the word “bank” first appeared in English in the 12th century, it meant “a raised shelf or ridge of ground; a long, high mound with steeply sloping sides; one side or slope of such a ridge or mound,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded here, is from a Middle English homily that compares straightening a crooked life to leveling the banks (“bannkess”) and filling the hollows (“græfess”) of uneven land:
“Whær se iss all unnsmeþe ȝet. Þurrh bannkess. & þurrh græfess … Þær shulenn beon ridinngess nu” (“Wherever it is all unsmooth yet, through banks and through hollows … there shall be clearings now”). From the Ormulum (circa 1175), a collection of early Middle English homilies.
In the early 14th century, the noun “bank” came to mean “the sloping, vertical, or overhanging edge of a river or other watercourse; (also more broadly) the land running immediately alongside a river or other watercourse,” the OED says.
The first Oxford example is from the Latin episcopal register of Richard de Kellawe, Bishop of Durham, England. In this passage, which refers to the apportionment of water, the Middle English word “bank” (sometimes spelled with a final “e” or an apostrophe to show its omission) is mixed in with the Latin:
“Et eadem aqua mensurari debet a le mainflod, quando eadem aqua ita fluit ut sit plena de bank’ en bank’ ” (“And the same water should be measured at high water, when the same water flows in such a way that it is full from bank to bank”). From Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense: The Register of Richard de Kellawe, Lord Palatine and Bishop of Durham, 1311–1316, edited by Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy in 1875.
Around the same time, the noun “bank” came to mean “the sea coast or shore,” the OED says, and was used “also in plural in same sense.” We suspect that this use of the plural “banks” for a seacoast may have led to the usage you’re asking about.
The noun “bank” is singular in the dictionary’s earliest coastal citation: “Sur la ripe est vn ceroyne, On the bank is a meremayde.” From a Middle English guide to French conversation (c. 1350), cited in “Nominale Sive Verbale,” edited by Walter William Skeat, published in Transactions of the Philological Society, November 1906.
The noun is plural in the next Oxford citation: “They had a syght of the bankys of Normandy.” From Morte Darthur, Thomas Mallory’s Middle English prose version of the legendary tales of King Arthur, written sometime before 1470.
And here’s an example we’ve found for the plural “banks” used in referring to a cottage on the River Great Ouse in Buckinghamshire. This passage is from the English poet William Cowper’s “A Poetical Epistle to Lady Austen” (1781):
And you, though you must needs prefer
The fairer scenes of sweet Sancerre,Are come from distant Loire, to choose
A cottage on the banks of Ouse.
Finally, a stanza from “Banks of the Ohio,” an anonymous 19th-century folk song about a woman slain on a riverbank, as sung by Pete Seeger:
Then only say, that you’ll be mine,
In no other arms you’ll find!
Down beside where the waters flow
On the banks of the Ohio.
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