Ullswater

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A large freshwater lake in the Lake District of northwestern England, lying among fells and popular with walkers and boaters
2. The second-largest lake in England's Lake District, set in scenic hills of Cumbria and Westmorland and famed for its beauty
3. A scenic glacial lake in the Lake District national park of Cumbria, England, admired for its surrounding mountains and clear water

Etymology: Ullswater is a lake in Cumbria's Lake District, and its name is a Norse layer laid over an older landscape. The first part, "Ull-", most likely comes from "Ulfr," an Old Norse personal name meaning "wolf." The second part, "-water," is not the English word for a stream or sea. It comes from the Old Norse "vatn," meaning "lake" or "lake-water," which English adopted as a regional term for lakes. So the name means roughly "Ulfr's lake," a name that Scandinavian settlers likely gave the water in the centuries after they arrived in northwest England. Other lakes in the district carry the same element. Windermere, Derwentwater and Thirlmere all end in "-mere" or "-water," and "-water" is the local choice in the north-east of the region, where Norse place-naming was densest. The "-water" ending has nothing to do with the modern sense of water as a substance. It only names a body of standing water.