Dictionaries › English

lake

Pronunciation: /leɪk/

The English word “lake” has 13 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A large, landlocked stretch of water or similar liquid.
  2. A large amount of liquid.
  3. A small stream of running water; a channel for water; a drain.
  4. A pit, or ditch.
  5. An offering, sacrifice, gift.
  6. Play; sport; game; fun; glee.
  7. A kind of fine, white linen.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.

verb

  1. To present an offering.
  2. To leap, jump, exert oneself; to play.
  3. To subject biological cells to repeated cycles of freezing and thawing until lysis.
  4. To make lake-red.

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…

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “lake” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.