Meaning
A strip of ground that is unowned, disputed, or abandoned by the parties on either side of it; historically, the deadly open ground between opposing trench systems. Figuratively it describes any ill-defined middle area that falls under no clear jurisdiction, category, or responsibility, a grey zone between two systems or groups. The battlefield association survives strongly, so figurative uses tend to carry a hint of danger, desolation, or abandonment. Regional use: General English (medieval land term; military popularisation).
Origin
Much older than the First World War, although that war fixed it in the general imagination. Research by the geographer Alasdair Pinkerton, reported by the BBC in 2015, traces the name to the Domesday Book of 1086, for parcels of land lying just beyond London's city walls; that early date rests on attribution rather than a surviving printed quotation. The Oxford English Dictionary's dated record begins in 1320 with 'nonesmanneslond', land under dispute or legal disagreement. In later centuries the name was applied to extra-parochial scraps beyond the rule of church or lord (havens for brigands, and in one London case a place of execution), and, at sea, to a space amidships where gear was stowed. The military sense, for the cratered, wired strip between the opposing trenches, first appears in Ernest Swinton's 1908 short story 'The Point of View'; in August 1914 British soldiers still said 'between the trenches', but Swinton's late-1914 dispatches and the Christmas truce of that year carried 'no man's land' into official communiques, newspapers, and soldiers' letters, and hence into universal use.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- in no man's land (figurative)
- No Man's Land (place name)
Usage Examples
- Their garden ended at a muddy no man's land behind the railway embankment that nobody had claimed since the war.
- Driverless cars still sit in a regulatory no man's land between vehicle law and software law.
- A strip of no man's land ran between the two motorway fences, and neither farmer would graze sheep on it.