lake - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

A mountain lake.

Arose from a conflation of

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”).[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:
      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.
    • 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[6], →DOI:
      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 ].
  2. A large amount of liquid.
    Synonym: mountain
    a lake of wine
    • 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.

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.

lake (plural lakes)

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

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. To subject biological cells to repeated cycles of freezing and thawing until lysis.

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 लाक्षा (lākṣā). Doublet of lac and lacquer.

lake (countable and uncountable, 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
    • 1954 August, Basil M. Bazley, “Three Scottish Railways”, in Railway Magazine, page 534:
      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.
    • 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.

a kind of coloring agent

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

  1. To make lake-red.

  2. ^ “lake, n.3.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2021.

  3. ^ Kroonen, Guus (2013), “Lagu-”, in Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 11)‎[1], Leiden, Boston: Brill, →ISBN

lake

  1. second-person singular present admirative of laj

lake

  1. (Litovska) dative of joj

lake

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

From French queue.

lake

  1. tail
  2. queue

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

From Low German lake. Compare Danish lage and Swedish 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 (Cyrillic spelling лаке)

  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

lake

  1. ji class(V) 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

  2. ^ Hellquist, Elof (1922), “1. lake”, in Svensk etymologisk ordbok [Swedish etymological dictionary]‎[2] (in Swedish), Lund: C. W. K. Gleerups förlag, page 394

  3. ^ “lake”, in Svenska Akademiens ordbok [Dictionary of the Swedish Academy]‎[3] (in Swedish), 1937

From Old Norse laki.[1][2]

lake c

  1. burbot (Lota lota spp.)
    Synonym: (colloquial) slemhelge
  1. ^ Hellquist, Elof (1922), “2. lake”, in Svensk etymologisk ordbok [Swedish etymological dictionary]‎[4] (in Swedish), Lund: C. W. K. Gleerups förlag, pages 394-395
  2. ^ “lake”, in Svenska Akademiens ordbok [Dictionary of the Swedish Academy]‎[5] (in Swedish), 1937

From French laqué.[1]

lake

  1. Polished with lacquer.
  1. ^ Nişanyan, Sevan (2002–), “lake”, in Nişanyan Sözlük