The podictionary word for today is lake . I chose this word because over the coming months many of us will be swimming or fishing or waterskiing or doing something in a lake.
Before I looked it up I never suspected that lake might have so many meanings, there are six nouns and three verbs all spelled lake and considered to be different words by the Oxford English Dictionary.
The first one is a noun that showed up in Beowulf—that thousand year old poem that makes up about a tenth of the surviving English documentation that we have from a millennium ago. That meaning of lake was “a sacrifice” or “a gift,” a meaning that seems to have dropped out of sight. In fact lake hasn't been used that way in 750 years. The next noun appeared around 800 years ago this time from Old Norse and meant “a game,” “play” or “sport.” Still pretty uncommon but Charlotte Bronte used the word only 150 years ago, so it may be poised for a comeback in light of all the sport and game of our summer lakes.
The third lake is perhaps a little more familiar to us even though it is the oldest word, dating from 950 AD and is thus Old English. Here it means “a stream” or “rivulet” and is related to the word “leak” as well as “leach,” as in “water flowing through soil can leach the minerals out of it.” The OED asserts however that this “river” lake is not related to the lake that we recognize as a large standing body of water.
Our lake comes instead through Old French and ultimately from Latin. Even for this meaning of lake the OED offers 6 different meanings, and dedicates well over 3,000 words to it—that's about 10 typewritten pages. The last two nouns I'll dispense with quickly—they meant a kind of Dutch lace and a sort of red dye—both meanings flitting in and out of usage over a couple of hundred years either side of Shakespeare's time. The nouns of course were built on the verbs: to play, to sacrifice and to dye—dye something red that is.
A couple of lakes feature in mythology: the Romans held that the entrance to hell was through the lake Avernus, which really does exist in Italy. This lake stinks of sulfur and its very name means “no birds,” presumably because of the smell. More pleasant is the lake from which the lady gave King Arthur his sword Excalibur.
