Definition
nounA large, landlocked stretch of water or similar liquid.
nounA large amount of liquid.
Sentence Examples
At the foot of the hill is a beautiful lake.
It was a close call when the little girl almost drowned in the lake.
The road went in a huge loop around the lake.
Word Origin & History
Arose from a conflation of
* Middle English lake (“small stream of running water, pool, lake”), from Old English lacu (“stream, pool, pond, lake”), from Proto-West Germanic *laku, from Proto-Germanic *lakō (“stream, pool, body of water", originally "a place where water runs off and collects”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *leg- (“to leak, drain”); with
* Middle English lac (“lake”), from Old French lac (“lake, ditch, pit”), a borrowed term, likely from Latin lacus (“lake, tub, vat”) (see Old French lac for more).
The first element is related to Dutch laak (“stream, drainage ditch, pond”), German Low German Lake, Laak (“drainage, marshland”), German Lache (“puddle, pool”), Norwegian løk (“a deep, slow-moving stream; a widening in a stream or river”), Faroese løkur (“small brook”) and lækja (“water hole, well, watershoot in a brook”), Icelandic lækur (“stream”).
Despite their similarity in form and meaning, Old English lacu is not related to English lay (“lake”), Latin lacus (“hollow, lake, pond”), Scottish Gaelic loch (“lake”), Ancient Greek λάκκος (lákkos, “waterhole, tank, pond, pit”), all from Proto-Indo-European *lókus, *l̥kwés (“lake, pool”).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Judge Short had gone to town, and Farrar was off for a three days' cruise up the lake. I was bitterly regretting I had not gone with him when the distant notes of a coach horn reached my ear, and I descried a four-in-hand winding its way up the inn road from the direction of Mohair."
— 1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter IV, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC:
"These included other Niphargus species from deep cave lakes and coastal anchihaline caves [23 ] and Gammarus and Echinogammarus amphipods that live only in permanently watered streams [21 ,24 ]."
— 2015 July 31, “Morphologically Cryptic Amphipod Species Are “Ecological Clones” at Regional but Not at Local Scale: A Case Study of Four Niphargus Species”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI:
"The colour scheme of the North British Railway—dark gamboge for the engines and lake for the coaches—looked very smart when new and clean, but these shades did not possess good wearing qualities."
— 1954 August, Basil M. Bazley, “Three Scottish Railways”, in Railway Magazine, page 534:
"Jeremiah found himself indoors, perfecting his Draftsmanship, bending all day over the work-table, grinding and mixing his own Inks,— siftings and splashes ev'rywhere of King's Yellow, Azure, red Orpiment, Indian lake, Verdigris, Indigo, and Umber."
— 1997, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 24, in Mason & Dixon, 1st US edition, New York: Henry Holt and Company, →ISBN, part One: Latitudes and Departures, page 242: