Freshwater

How to spell freshwater

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce freshwater

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does freshwater mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to, living in, or consisting of water that is not salty, such as lakes, rivers, and streams.

Freshwater in a sentence

• The aquarium keeps its tropical freshwater fish in heated tanks.

• Many freshwater lakes in the region are fed by mountain snowmelt.

Where does freshwater come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound of two of the oldest words in English, both inherited directly from Old English rather than borrowed from any foreign tongue. The first element comes from Old English 'fersc', meaning water that was not salty or, more broadly, pure and unspoilt; the same Germanic root lies behind the modern sense of 'fresh' as new or unstale. The second element comes from Old English 'waeter', the everyday word for the liquid, related to Dutch 'water' and German 'Wasser'. The two words were habitually paired to distinguish inland lakes and rivers from the sea, and by the later medieval period they had fused into a single descriptive term. Because both parts are familiar everyday words, the only spelling decision is whether to write them as one word, and the standard modern adjective is the closed compound 'freshwater'.

How the word is built

• fresh (not salty, clean)
• water (the liquid)