Looe

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A small fishing and holiday town on the south coast of Cornwall in southwest England, sitting at the mouth of the River Looe
2. A seaside settlement in Cornwall, England, known for its harbour, fishing boats and visitors drawn to the Cornish coast
3. The name of a fishing town on the Cornish coast of southwest England, located near the mouth of its namesake river

Etymology: "Looe" is a small fishing town on the south coast of Cornwall, and the name comes from the Cornish word "logh", meaning "inlet". The town sits where a river reaches the sea through a narrow creek, and that is the landscape the name records: a little pocket of water tucked into the coast. The same root turns up across the British Isles in other forms. "Lay", "loch" and "lough" are all doublets of this word, meaning that they descend from the same ancestor but reached English and neighbouring languages by different routes. "Loch" is the Scottish Gaelic and Scots form, familiar from the lakes of the Highlands, while "lough" is the Irish-English equivalent. "Lay", used in some English coastal dialects for a sheltered inlet, shows the same sense in a more English shape.