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Loch is the Scottish Gaelic, Scots, and Irish word for a lake or sea inlet. It is cognate with the Manx lough, Cornish logh, and one of the Welsh words for lake, llwch.

In English English and Hiberno-English, the anglicized spelling lough is commonly found in place-names; in Lowland Scots and Scottish English, the spelling “loch” is always used. Many loughs are connected to stories of lake bursts, signifying their mythical origin.

Sea-inlet lochs are often called sea lochs or sea loughs. Some such bodies of water could also be called firths, fjords, estuaries, straits or bays.

This name for a body of water is Insular Celtic in origin and is applied to most lakes in Scotland and to many sea inlets in the west and north of Scotland. The word comes from Proto-Indo-European *lókus (“lake, pool”) and is related to Latin lacus (“lake, pond”) and English lay (“lake”).

Lowland Scots orthography, like Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Irish, represents /x/ with ch, so the word was borrowed with identical spelling.

English borrowed the word separately from a number of loughs in the previous Cumbric language areas of Northumbria and Cumbria. Earlier forms of English included the sound /x/ as gh (compare Scots bricht with English bright). However, by the time Scotland and England joined under a single parliament, English had lost the /x/ sound. This form was therefore used when the English settled Ireland. The Scots convention of using ch remained, hence the modern Scottish English loch.

In Welsh, what corresponds to lo is lu in Old Welsh and llw in Middle Welsh such as in today’s Welsh placenames Llanllwchaiarn, Llwchwr, Llyn Cwm Llwch, Amlwch, Maesllwch, the Goidelic lo being taken into Scottish Gaelic by the gradual replacement of much Brittonic orthography with Goidelic orthography in Scotland.

Many of the loughs in Northern England have also previously been called “meres” (a Northern English dialect word for “lake” and an archaic Standard English word meaning “a lake that is broad in relation to its depth”) such as the Black Lough in Northumberland.^[2] However, reference to the latter as loughs (lower case initial), rather than as lakes, inlets, and so on, is unusual.

Some lochs in Southern Scotland have a Brythonic rather than Goidelic etymology, such as Loch Ryan where the Gaelic loch has replaced a Cumbric equivalent of Welsh llwch. The same is perhaps the case for water bodies in Northern England named with ‘Low’ or ‘Lough’ or otherwise, it represents a borrowing of the Brythonic word into the Northumbrian dialect of Old English.

Although there is no strict size definition, a small loch is often known as a lochan (so spelled also in Scottish Gaelic; in Irish it is spelled lochán).

Perhaps the most famous Scottish loch is Loch Ness, although there are other large examples such as Loch Awe, Loch Lomond, and Loch Tay.

Examples of sea lochs in Scotland include Loch Long, Loch Fyne, Loch Linnhe, and Loch Eriboll. Elsewhere in Britain, places like the Afon Dyfi can be considered sea lochs. Wikipedia

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