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Loch (lɒx) is the Scottish Gaelic, Scots and Irish word for a lake or sea inlet. It is cognate with the Manx lough, Cornish logh, and one of the Welsh words for lake, llwch . In English English and Hiberno-English, the anglicised spelling lough is commonly found in place names; in Lowland Scots and Scottish English, the spelling "loch" is always used. Many loughs are connected to stories of lake-bursts, signifying their mythical origin. Sea-inlet lochs are often called sea lochs or sea loughs. Some such bodies of water could also be called firths, fjords, estuaries, straits or bays. This name for a body of water is Insular Celtic in origin and is applied to most lakes in Scotland and to many sea inlets in the west and north of Scotland. The word comes from Proto-Indo-European *lókus ("lake, pool") and is related to Latin lacus ("lake, pond") and English lay ("lake"). Lowland Scots orthography, like Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Irish, represents x with ch, so the word was borrowed with identical spelling. English borrowed the word separately from a number of loughs in the previous Cumbric language areas of Northumbria and Cumbria. Earlier forms of English included the sound /x/ as gh (compare Scots bricht with English bright). However, by the time Scotland and England joined under a single parliament, English had lost the /x/ sound. This form was therefore used when the English settled Ireland. The Scots convention of using ch remained, hence the modern Scottish English loch. In Welsh, what corresponds to lo is lu in Old Welsh and llw in Middle Welsh such as in today's Welsh placenames Llanllwchaiarn, Llwchwr, Llyn Cwm Llwch, Amlwch, Maesllwch, the Goidelic lo being taken into Scottish Gaelic by the gradual replacement of much Brittonic orthography with Goidelic orthography in Scotland. Many of the loughs in Northern England have also previously been called "meres" (a Northern English dialect word for "lake" and an archaic Standard English word meaning "a lake that is broad in relation to its depth") such as the Black Lough in Northumberland.

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Related concepts (14)

Loch

Scotland

Scotland (Scotland; Alba ˈal̪ɣapə) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, Scotland is the second-largest country in the United Kingdom, and accounted for 8% of the population in 2019. Scotland's only land border is a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, the North Sea to the northeast and east, and the Irish Sea to the south.

Scottish Gaelic

Scottish Gaelic ('gaelIk, ; Gàidhlig ˈkaːlɪkj), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well as both Irish and Manx, developed out of Old Irish. It became a distinct spoken language sometime in the 13th century in the Middle Irish period, although a common literary language was shared by the Gaels of both Ireland and Scotland until well into the 17th century.