water column

noun

plural water columns

1

: a vertical expanse of water stretching between the surface and the floor of a body of water

Shallow feeders, sea lions work the top 600 feet of the water column for hake, rock-fish, herring, sardines … and squid, but opportunistically capturing anything that happens by.

—Downs Matthews

Only a few animals of the water column above would have died and settled into the sediments below during the short time when the mudslide was coalescing into a layer of sediment in the stagnant basin.

—Stephen Jay Gould

2

: a vertical pipe with valves and spout for delivering water to a locomotive tender

Examples of water column in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Pollock vessels use pelagic, or midwater, trawls that are designed to fish in the water column rather than along the seafloor the way bottom trawls do. — Annika Hammerschlag, Los Angeles Times, 13 Oct. 2026

Advanced blue-green optical communications penetrate the water column to communicate with submerged submarines without requiring them to deploy compromise-prone antennas. — Rohit Jha, Forbes.com, 1 Oct. 2026

Before my group of divers reaches the sandy bottom 90 feet down, lemon sharks arrive to greet us, moving up through the water column for a closer look. — Terry Ward, Travel + Leisure, 26 Sep. 2026

Deep Fission says the water column and surrounding rock could provide containment, operating pressure, heat transfer, and emergency cooling. — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 10 Sep. 2026

Word History

First Known Use

1845, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for water column

• collum
• sholom
• slalom
• solemn