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lake

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A pigment consisting of organic coloring matter with an inorganic, usually metallic base or carrier, used in dyes, inks, and paints.
  • noun A deep red.
  • noun A large inland body of fresh water or salt water.
  • noun A scenic pond, as in a park.
  • noun A large pool of liquid.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Play; sport; game.
  • noun A contest; a fight.
  • noun A kind of fine white linen.
  • A dialectal form of leak.
  • noun A body of water surrounded by land, or not forming part of the ocean and occupying a depression below the ordinary drainage-level of the region.
  • noun A relatively small pond partly or wholly artificial, as an ornament of a park or of public or private grounds.
  • noun A stream; rivulet.
  • noun A pit; den.
  • To become laky, or like a lake (pigment) in color. See laky.
  • To cause to resemble a lake (pigment) in color; specifically, discharge (the hemoglobin) rapidly from the erythrocytes into the blood-plasma.
  • To play; sport; trifle; “lark.”
  • noun A pigment formed by absorbing animal, vegetable, or coal-tar coloring matter from an aqueous solution by means of metallic bases.
  • noun An obsolete or dialectal form of lack.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A large body of water contained in a depression of the earth's surface, and supplied from the drainage of a more or less extended area.
  • noun (Ethnol.) people of a prehistoric race, or races, which inhabited different parts of Europe. Their dwellings were built on piles in lakes, a short distance from the shore. Their relics are common in the lakes of Switzerland.
  • noun (Archæol.) dwellings built over a lake, sometimes on piles, and sometimes on rude foundations kept in place by piles; specifically, such dwellings of prehistoric times. Lake dwellings are still used by many savage tribes. Called also lacustrine dwellings. See Crannog.
  • noun (Zoöl.) any one of numerous species of dipterous flies of the genus Chironomus. In form they resemble mosquitoes, but they do not bite. The larvæ live in lakes.
  • noun (Zoöl.) the cisco (Coregonus Artedii).
  • noun a collective name originally applied in contempt, but now in honor, to Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, who lived in the lake country of Cumberland, England, Lamb and a few others were classed with these by hostile critics. Called also lakers and lakists.
  • noun (Zoöl.) a sturgeon (Acipenser rubicundus), of moderate size, found in the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. It is used as food.
  • noun (Zoöl.) any one of several species of trout and salmon; in Europe, esp. Salmo fario; in the United States, esp. Salvelinus namaycush of the Great Lakes, and of various lakes in New York, Eastern Maine, and Canada. A large variety of brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis), inhabiting many lakes in New England, is also called lake trout. See Namaycush.
  • noun (Zoöl.) See Whitefish.
  • noun (Zoöl.) an American whitefish (Coregonus Labradoricus), found in many lakes in the Northern United States and Canada. It is more slender than the common whitefish.
  • noun A pigment formed by combining some coloring matter, usually by precipitation, with a metallic oxide or earth, esp. with aluminium hydrate
  • noun obsolete A kind of fine white linen, formerly in use.
  • intransitive verb Prov. Eng. To play; to sport.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun obsolete Fine linen.
  • noun A small stream of running water; a channel for water; a drain.
  • noun A large, landlocked, naturally-occurring stretch of water.
  • noun A large amount of liquid; as, a wine lake.
  • noun 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.
  • verb To make lake-red.
  • noun obsolete An offering, sacrifice, gift.
  • noun dialectal Play; sport; game; fun; glee.
  • verb obsolete To present an offering.
  • verb To leap, jump, exert oneself, play.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a purplish red pigment prepared from lac or cochineal
  • noun a body of (usually fresh) water surrounded by land
  • noun any of numerous bright translucent organic pigments

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From French laque; see lac.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old French lac and from Old English lacu, both from Latin lacus.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English lachen

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English lake ("lake, watercourse, body of water"), from Old English lacu ("lake, pond, pool, stream, watercourse"), from Proto-Germanic *lakō, *lakiz (“stream, pool, water aggregation", originally "ditch, drainage, seep”), from Proto-Germanic *lekanan (“to leak, drain”), from Proto-Indo-European *leg-, *leǵ- (“to leak”). Cognate with Dutch laak ("lake, pond, stream"), Middle Low German lāke ("standing water, water pooled in a riverbed"), German Lache ("pool, puddle"), Icelandic lækur ("stream, brook, flow"). See also leak, leach.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French laque ("lacquer"), from Persian لاک (lāk), from Hindi lakh, from Sanskrit laksha ("one hundred thousand"), referring to the number of insects that gather on the trees and make the resin seep out.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

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 *laikan (“play, fight”), *laikaz (“game, dance, hymn, sport”), from Proto-Indo-European *loig-, *leig- (“to bounce, shake, tremble”). Cognate with Old High German leih ("song, melody, music") and Albanian luaj ("I move, play"). More at lay.

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Examples

Comments

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  • chained_bear commented on the word lake

    "Another aesthetic practice that Europeans had in common with the ancient Mexicans was the use of cochineal as an artists' pigment. In Europe, cochineal was usually used as an ingredient for crimson lake--lake being the general term for any pigment made by attaching colorless inorganic compounds to translucent dyes, enabling the dyes to be used in painting.

    Red lakes were also made with madder, lac, and various types of kermes. Only recently have museum conservationists discovered reliable ways of distinguishing which dyestuff was used in a given work of art. Although many paintings have yet to be tested, and others have produced equivocal results, early analysis indicates that cochineal was much more slowly adopted by painters than by dyers. Largely ignored for several decades, cochineal lakes finally came into their own in the late 1500s and 1600s, finding a place on the palettes of masters like Tintoretto, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Dyck. ...

    To make cochineal lakes, painters sometimes started with shearings from cochineal-dyed textiles, then boiled them in lye and added alum to extract the red coloring. ...

    Cochineal paints were not nearly as durable as cochineal textile dyes. When made with a sufficient proportion of dye to fixative medium, cochineal lakes were fairly fast in oil paintings, but like all lakes they had a tendency to fade with exposure to light."

    Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 81-82, 82-83.

    October 5, 2017