the.com/catchment
The invisible border deciding which hospital or school owns your postcode.
means The area of land that drains into a particular river, reservoir, or system — or, by extension, the official zone whose residents are assigned to a given school, hospital, or service.
from Built straightforwardly from 'catch' plus the suffix '-ment', meaning roughly 'the act or means of catching'. It started as hydrology jargon in the 1800s for the area that 'catches' rainfall and funnels it into a river or basin — engineers needed a word for the land a watershed collects water from. The bureaucratic sense, where it means the population a school or hospital 'catches', is a later metaphorical borrowing: your postcode rains down into whichever institutional basin it was zoned for.
- geography term
- originally meant area draining into one river
- schools use it
- house prices spike near good catchment lines
- hospitals use it
- determines which ER legally must take you
- no fixed size
- can be one street or an entire county