If you find yourself on a desert island without a boat, what you are is “stranded.” On the face of it, that seems like an unusual term to use for that situation; why not “trapped” or something? By the way, if your pirate crew got tired of always having to let you win at Scrabble and stranded you on that island on purpose, that’s “marooning.” But more on that later.
Nowadays you can be “stranded” almost anywhere; if you car breaks down, you miss the last train, or your flight is cancelled, you’re stranded, too. But originally to be “stranded” was to be trapped on a beach. That’s because “strand” is the old term for “beach.” It was an Old English word (and for once, the Old English word was exactly the same: “strand”). It’s probably based on the much older Proto-Indo-European “ster,” which meant to stretch out.
At first, by which I mean more than a thousand years ago, “strand” was a pretty precise thing: it was the area on the shore between high and low tide marks. But as time went on, people tired of the grammar police of the age being so nitpicky (the grammar police are nitpicky in every age), and “strand” came to mean any part of the shoreline. It even included docks and wharves on a river. There’s a fairly well-known street in London called “The Strand” that got its name because it used to be right beside the Thames. It’s not beside the Thames any more — the street stayed put, but the river moved.
By the 1600s, sailing ships were very, very important to England, possibly influencing the adoption of some nautical terms into common usage. On a sailing ship, running into a sandy shoal (a slightly submerged beach) was called “stranding,” and that’s where the figurative use of “stranding” as “being helplessly isolated somewhere” came from.
But what happened to the use of “strand” to mean “beach?” It’s still in occasional use in Commonwealth countries, but even there “beach” has pretty much taken over and now rules the shore. “Beach” is a newer, shinier word than “strand;” it first appeared in the early 1500s, when it meant the pebbles and rocks found on some seashores. It only took until the late 1500s for “beach” to have shifted in meaning to indicate the whole shore — but it still had to include either sand or pebbles; it didn’t acquire as expansive a meaning as “strand.” “Beach” might be based on the Old English word “baece” (a stream or brook), but the problem with that theory is the centuries-long gap between the end of Old English and the appearance of “beach.” On the other hand it could be that we just don’t have any surviving written samples including the word.
One possible reason “beach” took over and “strand” faded is that Shakespeare used “beach” fairly often and seldom used “strand.” That’s probably the basis for another reason. When “strand” came to mean any sort of shoreline, whether it was beach, cliffs, docks, or a muddy, seaweedy mess, it became a less useful word because it didn’t communicate clearly. “Strand” retreated to meaning just a set of docks, eventually fading into relative obscurity. That left “beach” to mean the sandy things on the edge of bodies of water, “docks” to mean, well, docks, and “shore” as the overarching term for “border between land and sea.”
As for “marooning”, that really has nothing to do with beaches, shores, or strands. The Latin words “cyma” meant “sprout” (as in a new plant) and “cima” meant “summit.” From that apparent coincidence came the Spanish word “cimmaron” (wild or untamed, as you might be if you grew up living at the top of a mountain). That led to the French word “marron”, meaning the same thing. THAT led to “maron,” the English version of the French version of the Latin word, and “maron” was applied to fugitive slaves who escaped into the jungle in the West Indies in the 1600s. By the late 1600s to be “marooned” was to be lost in the wilderness, and by the early 1700s those light-fingered pirates had stolen the word and used it to refer to putting someone ashore on a deserted strand.
