How common is it to use the term "overland" to refer to transport by either land or sea only excluding flying?

I know I've personally used the term "overland" in the context of travel to mean travelling by any means other than air travel. In fact I thought I picked up this usage by seeing others use it this way.

But when I look it up, dictionaries do seem to say "overland" does not include travel by sea.

So is it just me or is it a case of a colloquial usage that's relatively established and widespread but just not acknowledged by dictionaries?

Solution 1:

If it is colloquial, it's probably regional.

Have a look at this NGram

Overland can be cited going back to the 1600's in travel-log literature, where it seems to be distinctly stories of "I went somewhere exotic, and I took the land route".

But it remains a pretty rare word, until the 1800's. From there it sees a major surge because of The Overland Trail and the Butterfield Overland Mail/Stage Co.

Both of which strictly mean "the land route". (Sorry)

Most of the "Overland" place names in the US have their roots directly in being trail stops (and not really having much else exciting going on at the time). In any case "correct use" of overland to describe a journey has returned to being pretty rare. If you do a google search stripping out all the place names and company names, it almost doesn't exist; and "incorrect use" has to be a super small subset of that.

So chances are if you're using it AT ALL, you're already in a group that doesn't care if it's in the dictionary or not. Embrace the fact that you're keeping alive a weird old remnant of history when traveling great distance by road was exotic and dangerous.