A historical region of north-central Europe bordering on the Baltic Sea in present-day northwest Poland and northeast Germany. It was inhabited by Slavic tribes in the 10th century and conquered by Poland in the 12th century. The territory was later split up and controlled by various powers, including the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany.
WORD HISTORY Pomerania was a district of Prussia extending along the Baltic from Straslund in eastern Germany to the Vistula in Poland. Pomeranian first occurs in English around 1760, referring to the toy dog, originally a sled dog in Lapland and later a shepherd dog in Germany. Pomerania is the medieval Latin form of German Pommern, itself a loanword in German from Slavic. The Polish word for Pomerania is Pomorze, composed of the preposition po, "along, by," and morze, "sea." The Slavic word for sea, more, which becomes morze in Polish, comes from the Indo-European noun *mori-, "sea," the source of Latin mare, "sea," and the mer- of English mermaid.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
