A lake is a naturally occurring, relatively large body of water localized in a basin or interconnected basins surrounded by dry land. Lakes lie completely on land and are separate from the ocean, although, like the much larger oceans, they form part of the Earth's water cycle by serving as large standing pools of storage water. Most lakes are freshwater and account for almost all the world's surface freshwater, but some are salt lakes with salinities even higher than that of seawater.
Lakes are typically much larger and deeper than ponds, which are also water-filled basins on land, although there are no official definitions or scientific criteria distinguishing the two. Most lakes are fed by springs, and both fed and drained by creeks and rivers, but some lakes are endorheic without any outflow, while volcanic lakes are filled directly by precipitation runoffs and do not have any inflow streams. Lakes are also distinct from lagoons, which are shallow tidal pools dammed by sandbars at coastal regions.
Natural lakes are generally found in mountainous areas (i.e. alpine lakes), dormant volcanic craters, rift zones and areas with ongoing glaciation. Other lakes are found in depressed landforms or along the courses of mature rivers, where a river channel has widened over a basin formed by eroded floodplains and wetlands. Some parts of the world have many lakes formed by the chaotic drainage patterns left over from the last ice age. All lakes are temporary over long periods of time, as they will slowly fill in with sediments or spill out of the basin containing them.
Artificially controlled lakes are known as reservoirs, and are usually constructed for industrial or agricultural use, for hydroelectric power generation, for supplying domestic drinking water, for ecological or recreational purposes, or for other human activities.
Etymology, meaning, and usage of "lake" The word lake comes from Middle English ('lake, pond, waterway'), from Old English ('pond, pool, stream'), from Proto-Germanic ('pond, ditch, slow moving stream'), from the Proto-Indo-European root ('to leak, drain'). Cognates include Dutch ('lake, pond, ditch'), Middle Low German ('water pooled in a riverbed, puddle') as in: :de:Wolfslake, :de:Butterlake, German ('pool, puddle'), and Icelandic ('slow flowing stream'). Also related are the English words leak and leach.
There is considerable uncertainty about defining the difference between lakes and ponds, and neither term has an internationally accepted definition across scientific disciplines or political boundaries. For example, limnologists have defined lakes as water bodies that are simply a larger version of a pond, which can have wave action on the shoreline or where wind-induced turbulence plays a major role in mixing the water column. None of these definitions completely excludes ponds and all are difficult to measure. For this reason, simple size-based definitions are increasingly used to separate ponds and lakes. Definitions for lake range in minimum sizes for a body of water from to . Pioneering animal ecologist Charles Elton regarded lakes as waterbodies of or more. The term lake is also used to describe a feature such as Lake Eyre, which is a dry basin most of the time but may become filled under seasonal conditions of heavy rainfall. In common usage, many lakes bear names ending with the word pond, and a lesser number of names ending with lake are, in quasi-technical fact, ponds. One textbook illustrates this point with the following: "In Newfoundland, for example, almost every lake is called a pond, whereas in Wisconsin, almost every pond is called a lake."
One hydrology book proposes to define the term "lake" as a body of water with the following five characteristics: It partially or totally fills one or several basins connected by straits; It has essentially the same water level in all parts (except for relatively short-lived variations caused by wind, varying ice cover, large inflows, etc.); It does not have regular intrusion of seawater; A considerable portion of the sediment suspended in the water is captured by the basins (for this to happen they need to have a sufficiently small inflow-to-volume ratio); The area measured at the mean water level exceeds an arbitrarily chosen threshold (for instance, one hectare).
With the exception of criterion 3, the others have been accepted or elaborated upon by other hydrology publications.