No-man's-land

No-man's-land is first cited in 1086 in the Domesday Book where it appears as 'none man's land', which describes a piece of wasteland that belongs to no one in particular. Such land in medieval times was also a place of execution outside a castle's or a town's walls. Its first citation as a zone between two opposing military forces is first recorded in the address that the Scottish geologist Roderick Impey Murchison (1792-1871) delivered at the Royal Geographical Society on 23rd May 1864, in which he described a piece of territory in the Sudan as a sort of 'no-man's-land' between two warring tribes. The expression gained wide usage, of course, during WWI, as the space between the opposing trench lines on the Western Front.