Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to
show current usage.Read More
Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors.
Send us feedback.
Recent Examples of fenCommoners relied on swamps, fens, forests, and heaths for fuel, gravel, stone, and wood to make tools and to build and repair houses.—Literary Hub,
19 Feb. 2026 The goal was to help preserve and protect the delicate valley and its fens.—
John Meyer,
Denver Post,
25 Aug. 2025 Out in the wild, the queen-of-the-prairie grows in moist black soil prairies and meadows, fens, seeps and springs.—
Sheryl Devore,
Chicago Tribune,
8 July 2025 Saving a satyr The property features a peat-bearing wetland called a fen, and the Mitchell’s satyr is only found in these rare habitats that take thousands of years to develop.—
Karl Schneider,
The Indianapolis Star,
31 Dec. 2024 Earth’s earliest wildfires may have been fitful and erratic, flickering among the amphibious flora of fens and bogs.—
Ferris Jabr,
The Atlantic,
25 June 2024 Bogs and fens are areas that accumulate peat – deposits of dead and partly decomposed plant materials that form organic-rich soil.—
Jon Sweetman,
The Conversation,
30 Sep. 2022
The ripe salt-sea smell, raw and delicious and foul, that rose up from the platform and haunted the marsh for miles around, was today tamped down by the freshwater air blowing down from the north.
—
Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
16 July 2026
Situated between busier coastal destinations this idyllic town and its marshes will immediately transport you back to your early carefree days playing in creeks, digging in pluff mud, catching crawfish, and tossing cast nets.
Healthy soils, wetlands, forests and working ecosystems aren’t just environmental assets.
—
Sara Roversi,
Forbes.com,
21 July 2026
For decades, so much water has been taken that the river seldom meets the sea in Mexico, and its delta, once filled with lush wetlands and forests, has shriveled to stretches of dry riverbed.
Yet somehow, two decades later, the viciously antisemitic Vichy regime planted itself in power; a shocking betrayal by France of some of its most loyal and generous supporters, in a dehumanizing toxic swamp of suspicion, judgment, envy.
—
Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
17 July 2026
Found over the eastern half of the state in swamps and sluggish waterways, coastal marshes, rivers, ponds and streams.