Random Lake Name Generator

How this random lake generator works

Press Generate and you get a lake. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them. The filters ignore case and trim before the draw.

Superior, Victoria, Baikal, Tanganyika, Titicaca, Toba, Biwa, Ladoga, Naivasha, Khövsgöl.

Ten lakes. You could probably name six more. The planet has rather more than that.

There are 117 million lakes

In 2014 a team led by Charles Verpoorter published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that did something nobody had done before. Instead of estimating how many lakes there are by extrapolating from the ones we know about, they counted them from satellite imagery.

The answer was about 117 million lakes larger than 0.002 square kilometres, which is a puddle roughly the size of a football pitch. Together they cover about 5 million square kilometres, which is 3.7 percent of the planet's non-glaciated land.

Ninety million of those are in the smallest size bracket. They are ponds by any ordinary use of the word, and they are lakes by the definition the paper used, and there is no agreed line between the two. The paper had to pick a threshold and say so, which is what every serious paper about lakes has to do.

There is no complete list of the world's lakes and there never will be. Most of them have no name. Nobody has stood beside them.

A lake is a hole that is temporarily full

Rivers last for tens of millions of years. Mountains last for hundreds of millions. Lakes are the shortest-lived large features on the surface of the Earth, and almost all of them are doomed.

Two things kill a lake. Rivers carry sediment into it, and it fills up from the bottom. And whatever is holding the water in, a moraine, a landslide, a lip of rock, slowly gives way, and it drains from the front. Every lake is losing this race.

Which is why the overwhelming majority of the world's lakes sit in places that were under ice twenty thousand years ago. Canada, Finland, Sweden, northern Russia, Minnesota. The glaciers gouged out millions of hollows, then melted into them, and there has not yet been time for the hollows to fill.

Look at a map of Canada and you are looking at the fingerprints of an ice sheet that left ten thousand years ago. Look at a map of the Sahara and there is nothing, because nothing has scraped it recently.

Lake Baikal is the famous exception. It sits in a rift where the crust is pulling apart, so instead of filling in, the hole keeps getting deeper. That is why it is the deepest lake on Earth and one of the very oldest.

Lake Vostok has never seen the sky

It is in Antarctica, and it is liquid water, and it sits beneath several kilometres of ice.

Nobody has ever seen its surface, because it does not have one in any sense you would recognise. The ice sheet presses down on it, and the pressure and the geothermal heat below keep the water liquid at temperatures that would freeze it anywhere else.

It has been sealed off from the atmosphere for an extremely long time. Whatever lives in it, if anything lives in it, has been evolving in the dark, in isolation, without contact with the rest of the biosphere.

It was found by radar, from above, by people flying over an unbroken white plain with no idea there was liquid water underneath them at all.

So a lake need not have a shore, or a surface, or a single photon of light. It needs a hollow and something to fill it.

Loch Ness and the Dead Sea are both lakes

Neither of them has the word in its name, and both of them are the most instructive lakes you can think about.

Loch Ness. A loch is a lake. The word is Scottish Gaelic and it covers both freshwater lakes and sea inlets, which is why Scotland has lochs that are lakes and lochs that are arms of the sea. The name tells you which language named it, and nothing else.

The Dead Sea. Not a sea. A lake, and a terminal one, meaning water flows in and nothing flows out. Everything that arrives leaves only by evaporating, and it leaves the salt behind. That is the entire explanation for why it is salty, and it is the same explanation for the Great Salt Lake and the Caspian.

A body of water is a lake if it is inland, surrounded by land, and not part of the ocean. What it is called depends on who named it and in what language. Loch, lough, lago, meer, nuur, ozero, tso. And sometimes, if it is big enough and salty enough, sea.

Ways people actually use this

• Geography quizzes. Generate five and ask which country each is in. Lake Khövsgöl will not be guessed.
• Deciding where to swim, or where to read about swimming. Most people can name six lakes. There are 117 million.
• Worldbuilding. Decide how your lake formed before you decide what it looks like. Glacial lakes are long and deep. Rift lakes are very deep and very old. Oxbows are curved. Craters are round.
• Naming things. Short, watery and mostly unclaimed.
• Testing text handling. Khövsgöl, Léman, Nyasa. Your database will have opinions.

Getting more out of the filters

• Almost every entry begins with the word "Lake", so Starts with L returns nearly everything. It is the one filter that is useless here. Use Contains instead.
• Type Great into Contains and you get the North American giants that break the naming pattern by putting the word Lake at the end.
• A few entries carry a second name in brackets, like Lake Malawi and Lake Geneva, so Ends with reads the closing bracket for those. Use Contains.
• Generate twenty at once and see how many countries you can place. Ten is a good score.

Questions people ask

How many lakes are there in the world?

About 117 million larger than 0.002 square kilometres, counted from satellite imagery rather than estimated. They cover 3.7 percent of the planet's non-glaciated land.

What is the difference between a lake and a pond?

Nothing agreed. Scientists studying lakes have to pick a size threshold and state it, which is exactly what the 117 million figure does. Below that line the same body of water is a pond in one paper and a lake in another.

Which is the deepest lake?

Lake Baikal in Siberia, because it sits in a rift valley where the Earth's crust is slowly pulling apart. Rift lakes get deeper over time instead of filling in, which is also why Baikal is among the oldest lakes on Earth.

Is the Dead Sea a lake?

Yes. It is inland, it has no outlet to the ocean, and everything that flows into it leaves by evaporation. The salt stays. Being called a sea is a naming decision, not a classification.

What about the Caspian Sea?

The largest inland body of water on the planet, and whether to call it a lake or a sea has been argued for a very long time. The answer has legal consequences for the five countries around it, because different bodies of international law apply to each.

References

1. Verpoorter and others, A global inventory of lakes based on high-resolution satellite imagery
2. Geophysical Research Letters, full text