FreeScrabbleDictionary

lake

Valid in Scrabble

Scrabble points
8
Words With Friends
9
Letters
4
Pronunciation
/leɪk/
See all 4 pronunciations
/leɪk/ · /læɪk/ · /lek/ · /leːk/

Definition of lake

30 senses · 3 parts of speech · etymology included

noun

  1. A large, landlocked stretch of water or similar liquid.
    “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 ].”
See all 30 definitions

noun

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

verb

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

name

  1. (countable, uncountable)A surname.
  2. (countable, uncountable)A unisex given name.
    “Lake Bell, Lake Chambers Speed”
  3. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  4. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  5. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  6. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  7. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  8. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  9. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  10. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  11. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  12. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  13. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  14. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  15. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  16. (countable, uncountable)A placename:
  17. (countable, uncountable)A placename:

Definitions from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA.

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…

See full 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”).

Anagrams of lake

4 plays · some not in Scrabble

Best play kale 8 points

Words you can make from lake

13 playable · top: KALE (8 pts)

Best play kale 8 points

4-letter words

1 word

3-letter words

6 words

2-letter words

5 words

Hooks

5 extensions · 2 front · 3 back

A single letter you can add to lake to make another valid word.

Front

Back

Find your best play with lake

See every word you can make from a set of letters that includes lake, or browse word lists you can mine for high-scoring plays.

Find more plays Browse word lists