turlough

[prettygoodword]

turlough (TUR-low, TUR-lakh) - n., a temporary lake in an area of karst limestone.


A turlough typically is filled during the rainy winter season by rising groundwater rather than by runoff -- gotta love porous stone. Typically fat-bottomed (some are used for pasturing in the summer) and of irregular duration (depending on how well it's drained). There is some disagreement among dictionaries over the etymology and proper pronunciation: it's from Gaelic, of course, and the tur- is taur, dry, but some say the -lough is from loch, lake (showing up in Scots names like Loch Ness) and pronounced with a gutteral -kh, while others that this is a mistaken folk etymology for -lach, a suffix indicating a place-name with a soft (almost silent) ending, closer to -low.

---L.

Comments

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Another possibility: tur- could be whole, absolute, entire, according to OED2 1915. I can't figure out how a Wikipedia editor got a gloss for "tuar lach" out of the Placename DB, which I too would tend to prefer over OED here, because it's not in their glossary. Unsupported, therefore. Bad Wikipedia.

I wonder what the railroad-builders or their admins found in Turlock, CA, to remind them of County Mayo. And: reanalysis of the "loch" lexeme? Support for it over "lach"? Dunno.

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia wasn't the only place with that etymology, but I cannot at the moment find the other cite -- will see if I can recreate my chain of clicks later. But there does seem to be even more confusion over this word than I thought.

---L.