lake

See also: Lake, Lãke, lakë, lakę, and łąkę

English

Pronunciation

• (UK, US) enPR: lāk, IPA^(key): /leɪk/

• Audio (UK):

  (file)

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -eɪk

Etymology 1

A mountain lake.

Arose from a conflation of the form of inherited Middle English lake (“small stream of running water, pool, lake”) with Middle English lac (“lake”), from Old French lac (“lake”) or Latin lacus (“lake, basin, tank”), see lac. The former, lake (“stream, pool, lake”), is inherited from Old English lacu (“stream, pool, expanse of water, lake”), from Proto-West Germanic *laku, from Proto-Germanic *lakō (“stream, pool, water aggregation”), ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European *leg- (“to leak, drain”). It is related to Dutch laak (“stream, drainage ditch, pond”), German Low German Lake, Laak (“drainage, marshland”), German Lache (“puddle”), 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”).

Noun

lake (plural lakes)

2. A large, landlocked stretch of water or similar liquid.
   • 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:

     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.

3. A large amount of liquid; as, a wine lake.
   • 1991, Robert DeNiro (actor), Backdraft:

     So you punched out a window for ventilation. Was that before or after you noticed you were standing in a lake of gasoline?

4. (now chiefly dialectal) A small stream of running water; a channel for water; a drain.
5. (obsolete) A pit, or ditch.

Usage notes

As with the names of rivers, mounts and mountains, the names of lakes are typically formed by adding the word before or after the unique term: Lake Titicaca or Great Slave Lake. Generally speaking, names formed using adjectives or attributives see lake added to the end, as with Reindeer Lake; lake is usually added before proper names, as with Lake Michigan. This derives from the earlier but now uncommon form lake of ~: for instance, the 19th-century Lake of Annecy is now usually simply Lake Annecy. There are exceptions to this generalization, however, including notably the names of the individual Finger Lakes (e.g. Oneida Lake, Seneca Lake, Cayuga Lake). It frequently occurs, however, that foreign placenames are misunderstood as proper nouns, as with the Chinese Taihu (“Great Lake”) and Qinghai (“Blue Sea”) being frequently rendered as Lake Tai and Qinghai Lake.

Synonyms

• See Thesaurus:lake

Derived terms

• Balsam Lake
• Bassenthwaite Lake
• Big Lake
• bore lake
• Brome Lake
• Canyon Lake
• Chengcing Lake
• Clay Lake
• Clear Lake
• crater lake
• data lake
• Dease Lake
• Detroit Lakes
• Devils Lake
• Diamond Lake
• dry lake
• Eastlake
• Elbow Lake
• ephemeral lake
• finger lake
• glacial lake outburst flood
• go jump in the lake
• Goose Lake
• Grand Lake
• Great Lakes
• Great Salt Lake
• Green Lake
• Hamburg lake
• interlake
• intermittent lake
• intralake
• kettle lake
• Knob Lake
• lac lake
• lacrimal lake
• Lake Albert
• Lake Andes
• Lake and Peninsula Borough
• Lake Asphaltites
• lake ball
• lakebed
• Lake Butler
• Lake Chad
• Lake Champlain
• Lake City
• Lake Country
• Lake County
• Lake District
• lake dwelling
• lake-effect
• lake effect
• lakefill
• lake fly
• lakefront
• lakeful
• Lake Geneva
• Lake Granby
• lakehead
• lakehouse
• lake itch
• Lake Jessie
• Lake Kyoga, Lake Kioga
• lakeland
• lake lawyer
• lakeless
• lakelet
• lakelike
• lakelore
• Lake Louise
• Lake Macquarie
• lakeness
• Lake Neuchâtel
• Lake of Bays
• lake of fire
• Lake of the Woods
• lake of Wada
• lake pigment
• Lake Pleasant
• lakeport
• Lake Providence
• lake quillwort
• Laker
• lake retention time
• Lakes
• lakescape
• lakeshore
• lake shore disease
• lakeside, Lakeside
• Lake Station
• lake stratification
• lake sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens)
• Lake Tai
• Lake Tanganyika
• Lake Thun
• Laketown
• lake trout
• Lake Victoria
• lakeview
• Lake Villa
• Lake Village
• lake village
• Lake Wakatipu
• lakeward
• lakewards
• lakewater
• lakeweed
• lakewide
• Lake Winnipeg
• Lake Wobegon
• lakish
• Lakism
• Lakist
• laky
• lava lake
• Llanquihue Lake
• Lower Lake
• Lynn Lake
• Lynn Lake
• Maroon Lake
• Maroon Lake
• maroon lake
• megalake
• meromictic lake
• Moses Lake
• Muskoka Lakes
• Nahuel Huapi Lake
• Niagara-on-the-Lake
• nonlake
• Otsego Lake
• oxbow lake
• palaeolake
• paleolake
• Palmer Lake
• paternoster lake
• Pine Lake
• playa lake
• prairie lake
• quake lake
• Rainy Lake
• Red Lake County
• Red Lake Falls
• Reindeer Lake
• Rideau Lakes
• rose lake
• Round Lake Beach
• Salem Lakes
• salt lake
• Salt Lake City
• Salt Lake County
• seasonal lake
• Shell Lake
• Silver Lake
• Slender West Lake
• Smoky Lake
• Smoky Lake
• Smoky Lake County
• soda lake
• Southlake
• South Lakeland
• Spirit Lake
• splake
• Split Lake
• Split Lake
• Spring Lake
• Storm Lake
• subglacial lake
• Timber Lake
• Todos los Santos Lake
• Trent Lakes
• Trout Lake
• Turquoise Lake
• Turquoise Lake
• Twin Lakes
• Westlake
• West Lake
• wine lake

 

Related terms

• lacustrine

Translations

See lake/translations § Noun.

See also

• billabong
• lagoon
• pond
• talav
• tarn

Further reading

• lake on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Astell, Ann W. (1999) Political Allegory in Late Medieval England, Cornell University Press, →ISBN, page 192.
• Cameron, Kenneth (1961) English Place Names, B. T. Batsford Limited, →ISBN, page 164.
• Ferguson, Robert (1858) English Surnames: And their Place in the Teutonic Family, G. Routledge & Co., page 368.
• Maetzner, Eduard Adolf Ferdinand (2009) An English Grammar; Methodical, Analytical, and Historical, BiblioBazaar, LLC, →ISBN, page 200.
• Rissanen, Matti (1992) History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN, pages 513–514.
• Sisam, Kenneth (2009) Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, BiblioBazaar, →ISBN.

Etymology 2

From Northern Middle English lake, lak, lac (also laik, layke; Southern loke), from Old English lāc (“play, sport, strife, battle, sacrifice, offering, gift, present, booty, message”), from Proto-West Germanic *laik, from Proto-Germanic *laikaz (“game, dance, hymn, sport”), from Proto-Indo-European *leyg- (“to bounce, shake, tremble”). Cognate with Old High German leih (“song, melody, music”), Old Norse leikr (whence Danish leg (“game”), Swedish leka (“to play”)), and Gothic 𐌻𐌰𐌹𐌺𐍃 (laiks, “dance”); Doublet of lek.

Verb form partly from Middle English laken, from Old English lacan, from Proto-Germanic *laikaną, from Proto-Indo-European *leyg-. More at lay, -lock.

Alternative forms

• laik

Noun

lake (plural lakes)

1. (obsolete) An offering, sacrifice, gift.
2. (dialectal) Play; sport; game; fun; glee.

Related terms

• bridelock
• wedlock

Verb

lake (third-person singular simple present lakes, present participle laking, simple past and past participle laked)

1. (obsolete) To present an offering.
2. (dialectal, Northern, UK) To leap, jump, exert oneself, play.
3. Subject biological cells to repeated cycles of freezing and thawing until lysis.

Etymology 3

From Middle English lake, from Old English *lacen or Middle Dutch laken; both from Proto-Germanic *lakaną (“linen; cloth; sheet”). Cognate with Dutch lake (“linen”), Dutch laken (“linen; bedsheet”), German Laken, Danish lagan, Swedish lakan, Icelandic lak, lakan.

Noun

lake (plural lakes)

1. (obsolete) A kind of fine, white linen.

Etymology 4

From French laque (“lacquer”), from Persian لاک (lâk), from Hindi लाख (lākh), from Sanskrit लाक्षा (lākṣā). Doublet of lac and lacquer.

Noun

lake (plural lakes)

1. In dyeing and painting, an often fugitive crimson or vermilion pigment derived from an organic colorant (cochineal or madder, for example) and an inorganic, generally metallic mordant.

   Synonym: lac

   • 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:

     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.

2. In the composition of colors for use in products intended for human consumption, made by extending on a substratum of alumina, a salt prepared from one of the certified water-soluble straight colors.

   The name of a lake prepared by extending the aluminum salt prepared from FD&C Blue No. 1 upon the substratum would be FD&C Blue No. 1--Aluminum Lake.

Derived terms

• crimson lake
• madder lake
• lake pigment
• lake-red

Translations

a kind of coloring agent

• Arabic: لَكّ m (lakk)
• Bulgarian: светлочервен лак m (svetločerven lak)
• Catalan: laca (ca) f
• Finnish: lakka (fi)
• French: laque (fr) f
• German: Färberlack m
• Greek: λάκη f (láki)
• Hebrew: לכה (he) f (lakah)
• Italian: lacca (it) f
• Japanese: ニス (ja) (nisu), 漆 (ja) (うるし, urushi)
• Korean: 래커 (raekeo)
• Macedonian: лак m (lak)
• Norwegian: ^{(please verify)} fargestoff n
• Polish: lakier (pl) m
• Portuguese: laca (pt) f
• Russian: лак (ru) m (lak)
• Spanish: laca (es) f
• Swahili: ziwa (sw)
• Thai: ครั่ง (khràng)

Verb

lake (third-person singular simple present lakes, present participle laking, simple past and past participle laked)

1. To make lake-red.

Anagrams

• Akel, Alek, Kale, Leak, ka le, kale, leak

Dutch

Pronunciation

• Audio:

  (file)

Verb

lake

1. (dated or formal) singular present subjunctive of laken

Anagrams

• kale

Mauritian Creole

Etymology

From French queue.

Noun

lake

1. tail
2. queue

References

• Baker, Philip & Hookoomsing, Vinesh Y. 1987. Dictionnaire de créole mauricien. Morisyen – English – Français

Norwegian Bokmål

Etymology 1

From Low German lake.

Noun

lake m (definite singular laken, indefinite plural laker, definite plural lakene)

1. (preservative) pickle, brine

Etymology 2

From Old Norse laki.

Noun

lake m (definite singular laken, indefinite plural laker, definite plural lakene)

1. (fish) burbot, eelpout (species Lota lota)

Etymology 3

As for Etymology 1.

Verb

lake

1. to pickle, put in brine

References

• “lake” in The Bokmål Dictionary.

Norwegian Nynorsk

Etymology 1

From Low German lake.

Noun

lake m (definite singular laken, indefinite plural lakar, definite plural lakane)

1. (preservative) pickle, brine

Etymology 2

From Old Norse laki.

Noun

lake m (definite singular laken, indefinite plural lakar, definite plural lakane)

1. (fish) burbot, eelpout (species Lota lota)

Etymology 3

As for Etymology 1.

Verb

lake

1. to pickle, put in brine

References

• “lake” in The Nynorsk Dictionary.

Serbo-Croatian

Adjective

lake

1. inflection of lak:
   1. masculine accusative plural
   2. feminine genitive singular
   3. feminine nominative/accusative/vocative plural

Seychellois Creole

Etymology

From French queue.

Noun

lake

1. tail
2. queue

References

• Danielle D’Offay et Guy Lionnet, Diksyonner Kreol - Franse / Dictionnaire Créole Seychellois - Français

Swahili

Adjective

lake

1. Ji class inflected form of -ake.

Swedish

Etymology 1

Borrowed from Middle Low German lâke (“brine; standing water”), from Old Saxon *laca, from Proto-West Germanic *laku (“steam, pool”).

Noun

lake c

1. brine

Declension

Declension of lake

		nominative	genitive
singular	indefinite	lake	lakes
	definite	laken	lakens
plural	indefinite	lakar	lakars
	definite	lakarna	lakarnas

Etymology 2

From Old Norse laki.

Noun

lake c

1. burbot (Lota lota spp.)

   Synonym: (colloquial) slemhelge

Declension

Declension of lake

		nominative	genitive
singular	indefinite	lake	lakes
	definite	laken	lakens
plural	indefinite	lakar	lakars
	definite	lakarna	lakarnas

References

• lake in Svensk ordbok (SO)
• lake in Svenska Akademiens ordlista (SAOL)
• lake in Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB)

Anagrams

• elak, kela, leka

Turkish

Etymology

From French laqué.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈla.ce/
• Hyphenation: la‧ke

Adjective

lake

1. Polished with lacquer.

Declension

predicative forms of lake

present tense
	positive, declarative	positive, interrogative	negative, declarative	negative, interrogative
ben (I am)	lakeyim	lake miyim?	lake değilim	lake değil miyim?
sen (you are)	lakesin	lake misin?	lake değilsin	lake değil misin?
o (he/she/it is)	lake / lakedir	lake mi?	lake değil	lake değil mi?
biz (we are)	lakeyiz	lake miyiz?	lake değiliz	lake değil miyiz?
siz (you are)	lakesiniz	lake misiniz?	lake değilsiniz	lake değil misiniz?
onlar (they are)	lake(ler)	lake(ler) mi?	lake değil(ler)	lake değiller mi?
past tense
	positive, declarative	positive, interrogative	negative, declarative	negative, interrogative
ben (I was)	lakeydim	lake miydim?	lake değildim	lake değil miydim?
sen (you were)	lakeydin	lake miydin?	lake değildin	lake değil miydin?
o (he/she/it was)	lakeydi	lake miydi?	lake değildi	lake değil miydi?
biz (we were)	lakeydik	lake miydik?	lake değildik	lake değil miydik?
siz (you were)	lakeydiniz	lake miydiniz?	lake değildiniz	lake değil miydiniz?
onlar (they were)	lakeydiler	lake miydiler?	lake değildi(ler) / değillerdi	lake değil miydiler?
indirect past
	positive, declarative	positive, interrogative	negative, declarative	negative, interrogative
ben (I was)	lakeymişim	lake miymişim?	lake değilmişim	lake değil miymişim?
sen (you were)	lakeymişsin	lake miymişsin?	lake değilmişsin	lake değil miymişsin?
o (he/she/it was)	lakeymiş	lake miymiş?	lake değilmiş	lake değil miymiş?
biz (we were)	lakeymişiz	lake miymişiz?	lake değilmişiz	lake değil miymişiz?
siz (you were)	lakeymişsiniz	lake miymişsiniz?	lake değilmişsiniz	lake değil miymişsiniz?
onlar (they were)	lakeymişler	lake miymişler?	lake değilmiş(ler) / değillermiş	lake değil miymişler?
conditional
	positive, declarative	positive, interrogative	negative, declarative	negative, interrogative
ben (if I)	lakeysem	lake miysem?	lake değilsem	lake değil miysem?
sen (if you)	lakeysen	lake miysen?	lake değilsen	lake değil miysen?
o (if he/she/it)	lakeyse	lake miyse?	lake değilse	lake değil miyse?
biz (if we)	lakeysek	lake miysek?	lake değilsek	lake değil miysek?
siz (if you)	lakeyseniz	lake miyseniz?	lake değilseniz	lake değil miyseniz?
onlar (if they)	lakeyseler	lake miyseler?	lake değilseler / değillerse	lake değil miyseler?

Related terms

• lak

 

Further reading

• “lake”, in Turkish dictionaries, Türk Dil Kurumu
• Çağbayır, Yaşar (2007) “lake”, in Ötüken Türkçe Sözlük (in Turkish), Istanbul: Ötüken Neşriyat, page 2931