catchment area

Questions about catchment area

What does catchment area mean?

catchment area means "the entire geographical area drained by a river and its tributaries; an area characterized by all runoff being conveyed to the same outlet".

What is another word for catchment area?

Close synonyms include river basin, basin, watershed, drainage basin, catchment basin. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is catchment area a common word?

catchment area is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.