Loch

Loch (/lɒx/ LOKH) is a word meaning "lake" or "sea inlet" in Scottish and Irish Gaelic, subsequently borrowed into English.

[citation needed] Lowland Scots orthography, like Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Irish, represents /x/ with ⟨ch⟩, so the word was borrowed with identical spelling.

[citation needed] English borrowed the word separately from a number of loughs in the previous Cumbric language areas of Northumbria and Cumbria.

[citation needed] 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"), similar to the Dutch meer, such as the Black Lough in Northumberland.

[4] The same is, perhaps, the case for bodies of water in Northern England named with 'Low' or 'Lough', or else represents a borrowing of the Brythonic word into the Northumbrian dialect of Old English.

For the mention of Afon Dyfi as a sea loch elsewhere in Britain, additional specific references may be limited, but its estuarine nature aligns with descriptions of transitional waters and reduced salinity environments comparable to sea lochs[5] Some new reservoirs for hydroelectric schemes have been given names faithful to the names for natural bodies of water.

[citation needed] The United States naval port of Pearl Harbor, on the south coast of the main Hawaiian island of Oʻahu, is one of a complex of sea inlets.