lake
/leɪk/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: 4.83 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "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."
- "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 ]."
- "a lake of wine"
- "So you punched out a window for ventilation. Was that before or after you noticed you were standing in a lake of gasoline?"
- "The agent was of course the Boggart, and it soon became their sport (which they called laking with Boggart) to put the shoe-horn into the hole and have it shot back at them."
- "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."
Etymology
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”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /leɪk/
- British English: /leɪk/
Usage
- Obsolete
- British usage
- Countable
- Uncountable
Subject
Wiktionary places this term in Law.