the.com/sand trap

means A hollow filled with sand positioned on a golf course to punish an errant shot, from which players must hack their ball out and onto the green.

from A straightforward compound from golf's own vocabulary — 'sand' plus 'trap,' the latter in its old sense of a hazard or snare rather than a literal spring-loaded device. The term emerged alongside the game's spread, as courses formalized natural dips and dug-out hollows into deliberate hazards; the more technical name 'bunker' comes from British and Scottish course-building and golf-architecture terms, but 'sand trap' is the plainer, largely American way of naming the same misery.