Dictionary:

placer

  (plăs'ər)

1. A glacial or alluvial deposit of sand or gravel containing eroded particles of valuable minerals.
2. A place where a placer deposit is washed to extract its mineral content.

[Spanish, shoal, placer, from Catalan placer, shoal, from plassa, place, from Medieval Latin placea. See place.]

California had just become part of the United States when gold was discovered there in 1848, but the state's Hispanic heritage was pervasive. The names of California places were mostly Spanish. Canyons, arroyos, and sierras were Spanish then, as they are now, and Spanish-derived words like ranch, plaza, and adobe (originally from Coptic) have remained familiar too, reflecting the Spanish-speaking Californians' way of life.

Gold mining, however, brought in new and mostly non-Hispanic terminology as it brought in the forty-niners, new and mostly non-Hispanic adventurers from the eastern parts of the United States. Their mining vocabulary included terms like bar, diggings, gulch, pay dirt, tailings, rocker, and wing dam, to use examples from an 1859 glossary of "Californianisms" published in a San Francisco newspaper. But even in the getting of gold, some Spanish influence could be noted, in the terms arastra (a mill for crushing quartz), color (visible gold), and placer. The last was the name for gold-bearing beds of sand and gravel, a special attraction of California's gold country. The 1859 glossary defined placer as "a place where gold is found in dirt near the surface of the ground."

What do these Spanish words have to do with Catalan, an Indo-European Romance language spoken in northern Spain by more than six million people? The explanation is that placer, like several dozen other words, seems to have been imported from Catalan into Spanish before being passed on to English. In Catalan, placer means a shoal or underwater sandbar. By the time the word got to English, as early as 1842, it could also mean a sandy place along a streambed but above water.

Catalan is also the likely source of these words brought by Spanish into English: frijoles (1577), brocade (1588), barracks (1686), capsize (1788), mirador (a window or tower with a view, 1797), and fajita (1984).

A deposit of heavy minerals in streambeds, in which the valuable substances have been concentrated as the lighter-weight minerals have been carried away by the stream.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: an alluvial deposit that contains particles of some valuable mineral

Placer may refer to one of the following:

• Placer deposit
• Placer sheep
• Placer mining

Geographical names:

• Placer, Masbate, Philippines
• Placer, Surigao del Norte, Philippines
• Placer County, California, United States

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