lake

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

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• Rhymes: -eɪk

A mountain lake.

Arose from a conflation of the form of inherited Middle English lake (“small stream of running water, pool, lake”) by 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”).[1]

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”).[2]

lake (plural lakes)

1. 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 222716698:

     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.

2. 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?

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

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.

• See Thesaurus:lake

• billabong
• lagoon
• pond
• talav
• tarn

• 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.

From Middle English lake, lak, lac (also loke, laik, layke), from Old English lāc (“play, sport, strife, battle, sacrifice, offering, gift, present, booty, message”), from Proto-Germanic *laiką (“play, fight”), *laikaz (“game, dance, hymn, sport”), from Proto-Indo-European *leyg-, *loig-, *leig- (“to bounce, shake, tremble”). Cognate with Old High German leih (“song, melody, music”). Verb form partly from Middle English laken, from Old English lacan, from Proto-Germanic *laikaną, from Proto-Indo-European *leyg-. More at lay, -lock.

lake (plural lakes)

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

• bridelock
• wedlock

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

1. (obsolete) To present an offering.
2. (chiefly dialectal) To leap, jump, exert oneself, play.

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.

lake (plural lakes)

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

From French laque (“lacquer”), from Persian لاک‎ (lâk), from Hindi लाख (lākh), from Sanskrit लक्ष (lakṣa, “one hundred thousand”), referring to the number of insects that gather on the trees and make the resin seep out. Doublet of lakh, lac, and lacquer.

lake (plural lakes)

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

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

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

1. To make lake-red.

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

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lake

1. (archaic) singular present subjunctive of laken

• kale

From French queue.

lake

1. tail
2. queue

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

From Low German lake.

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

1. (preservative) pickle, brine

From Old Norse laki.

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

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

As for Etymology 1.

lake

1. to pickle, put in brine

• “lake” in The Bokmål Dictionary.

From Low German lake.

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

1. (preservative) pickle, brine

From Old Norse laki.

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

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

As for Etymology 1.

lake

1. to pickle, put in brine

• “lake” in The Nynorsk Dictionary.

lake

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

From French queue.

lake

1. tail
2. queue

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

lake

1. Ji class inflected form of -ake.

Borrowed from Middle Low German lâke (“brine; standing water”), from Old Saxon *laca, from Proto-West Germanic *laku (“steam, pool”).[1][2]

lake c

1. brine

From Old Norse laki.[1][2]

lake c

1. burbot (Lota lota spp.)

• elak, kela, leka