freshwater

From Middle English freche watur, fresshe water; equivalent to fresh +‎ water.

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freshwater (not comparable)

1. Living in fresh water.

   The trout is a freshwater fish.

2. Consisting of fresh water.

   Lake Baikal is the world's largest freshwater lake in terms of volume.

3. (nautical) Unskilled as a seaman.

   a freshwater sailor

4. (economics) neoclassical, in reference to U.S. macroeconomics and economics departments near the Great Lakes.
   • 2012, John Quiggin, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, Princeton University Press (expanded paperback ed., 1st ed. from 2010), →ISBN, page 86.

     Meanwhile, the freshwater side of the dispute rapidly reverted to arguments from the nineteenth century, which had been debunked by Keynes and Irving Fisher.

   Synonym: sweetwater

freshwater (countable and uncountable, plural freshwaters)

1. (countable) A body of fresh water
   • 1953, Publications of the Institute of Marine Science, volume 3-4, page 100:

     Fossils with low Sr/Ca ratios indicating origin in a freshwater of a type which has a low Sr/Ca ratio: […]

   • 1967, Bent J. Muus, The Fauna of Danish Estuaries and Lagoons‎, page 87:

     Smith (1958) found that N. limnicola in Lake Merced, virtually a freshwater, had no paragnaths or at the most one on section I against the "normal" 1–2.

   • 2013, Brian R. Moss, Ecology of Fresh Waters: A View for the Twenty-First Century:

     The chances of long-term preservation of fossils in freshwaters are minimal, for freshwaters are readily disturbed and destroyed by drought on the land masses.

   • 2015, Sophie Lake; Durwyn Liley; Robert Still, Britain's Habitats:

     Freshwaters are portrayed in many artforms, including books such as Kenneth Grahame's childrens' story Wind in the Willows.

2. Alternative spelling of fresh water
   • 1978, Roger M. Waller; John T. Turk; Robert J. Dingman, “Potential effects of deep-well waste disposal in western New York”, in Geological Survey Professional Paper, page 21:

     Schematic diagram of the viscosity effect during the injection of freshwater.

   • 2002, Friedrich A. Schott, Physical Oceanography of the Indian Ocean During WOCE‎, page 1246:

     Above 200m, high-salinity water was being carried southward out of the Arabian Sea. This implies that most of the freshwater was imported into the Arabian Sea in the upper layer.

   • 2011, Guy Levy; P. Fine; A. Bar-Tal, Treated Wastewater in Agriculture‎:

     Actual field data of Cl distribution in soil after irrigation with TWW and freshwater were obtained in a field experiment in Israel (Feigin et al., 2005; Fine et al. 2007).

   • 2014 April 20, Richard Conniff, “An evolutionary family drama”, in The New York Times‎:

     Alewives are anadromous fish: Born in freshwater, they spend their lives in the ocean, returning annually to their birthplaces to spawn.