
thumb|Map showing the Waasland (red) on a map of Belgium The Waasland (, archaically "Waesland") or Land van Waas () is a historic region in northern Belgium. It is part of the Belgian province of East Flanders. The other borders are with the Scheldt and Durme rivers (east and south) and, to the north, the border with the Dutch region of Zeelandic Flanders. The (informal) capital and major city of the region is Sint-Niklaas.
thumb|Map showing the Waasland (red) on a map of Belgium The Waasland (, archaically "Waesland") or Land van Waas () is a historic region in northern Belgium. It is part of the Belgian province of East Flanders. The other borders are with the Scheldt and Durme rivers (east and south) and, to the north, the border with the Dutch region of Zeelandic Flanders. The (informal) capital and major city of the region is Sint-Niklaas.
Waas most likely refers to the soggy soil of the region although the exact etymology is unknown. One possibility is a connection to the English word "wasteland". The swamps that characterized it have long been drained although many fields are still noticeably convex; the result of many years of plowing the topsoil towards the center to improve drainage.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).