OED on Narrow

To better understand Alma 22:32, Alma 63:5 and Ether 10:20 we looked at all textual occurrences of the words "narrow,""strait" and "small" in the Book of Mormon to get a sense of the Nephite meaning of those terms. We concluded any geographic feature exceeding 20 kilometers in width is completely out of the question - the Nephites would not have called it "narrow" or "small," with 5 kilometers a much more likely upper limit. See the blog article "Narrow and Small Things."

The language that fell from the Prophet Joseph's lips in the moment of translation was Early Modern English as we saw in the blog article "Early Modern English." This makes it important for us to understand the sense of meaning the word "narrow" carried in the A.D. 1470 - A.D. 1700 Early Modern English era. We will examine the Oxford English Dictionary to see how the term "narrow" was used in a geographic context in Early Modern English. The word "narrow" appears over 4,000 times in the OED, so we have abundant data to work with.

The general sense of meaning for "narrow" is something slender or constricted, whose breadth or width is small in proportion to its length. An urban street with houses on either side is narrow. A tree-lined country lane is narrow. A brook or rivulet is narrow.

"Hee did shut them [Irish rebels] up within those narrow corners and glynnes [glens] under the mountaines foote." Edmund Spenser, A Veue of the Present State of Ireland, 1596. Reading Spenser in context it is clear the mountains he refers to are Mourne Mountains rising to elevations in excess of 600 meters in Newry and Mourne Council, Northern Ireland. This is a Google Earth image of one of the narrow glens at the foot of Mourne Mountains. This glen is 1.41 kilometers wide at the point indicated.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Narrow Glen at the foot of Mourne Mountains, Northern Ireland

"The small narrow streight of Menai." William Camden (Philemon Holland, translator) Britain; or A chorographicall description of England, Scotland and Ireland (London: G. Bishop and I Norton, 1610). Menai Strait is a stretch of tidal water separating the Isle of Anglesey from the Welsh mainland. It is .77 kilometers wide near Bangor.