7 Apr /15

Loch

Inevitably, the first association to come to mind when one hears Loch would be Loch Ness. The deep freshwater Scottish Highlands lake which is notoriously famous for been the alleged home of the Loch Ness Monster. The covered in mystery stories about Nessie helped quite a lot to populirize the Irish and Scottish Gaelic word for a lake – loch.

Yes, by now, we all know that loch stands for a lake or a landlock sea arm, but how did the word actually jump from old Gaelic to English to become a part of our modern vocabularly?

The word is belived to come from Latin roots, originating from lacus (opening, hole, pool, lake), though the Anglo-Irish lough to the Gaelic loch with the final meaning of a lake, narrow arm of the sea – which meaning was adopted into the English language in mid 15h century with the spelling forms of locht and louch.

And the spelling which we know and use today came only a century later with the first written evidences coming from 1553, when the reader was presented with a short poetry from an unknown Scottish Makar (Scottish word for a royal court poet).

The common plural form and the meaning of a loch to not only name a lake but also an arm of the sea originated in Scotland, as confirms the 1754, Edward Burt · Letters from a gentleman in the north of Scotland to his friend in London: “Winding Hollows between the Feet of the Mountains where into the Sea flows..Those the Natives call Lochs.”

Though by the 19th century, the word should had been still quite uncommon, as even 30 years later, an Englishman wrote in his travel journal of impressions from Scotland that: “Kingsburgh conducted us in his boat, across one of the lochs, as they call them, or arms of the sea”.

The Loch Ness monster came to the radar in 1933 and the first and most iconic picture to claim capturing its existence came out in the next year to get the world’s attention and turn the word loch globally recognizable.