A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
975 entries
finger lake
A long, narrow, deep lake occupying a valley carved by glacial action — the glacier excavated a trough and the meltwater filled it. The Finger Lakes of central New York are the type example: eleven parallel lakes, some over 600 feet deep, aligned like the fingers of a hand laid on the landscape. The shape is the glacier’s signature — long, straight, and deep.
Etymology
Descriptive compound — named for the resemblance of these elongated glacial lakes to fingers laid across the landscape, most directly after New York’s Finger Lakes region, itself named for that resemblance in the 19th century.