freshwater

Etymology

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

adj

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.

noun

1. (countable) A body of fresh water
   Fossils with low Sr/Ca ratios indicating origin in a freshwater of a type which has a low Sr/Ca ratio: […] 1953, Publications of the Institute of Marine Science, volumes 3-4, page 100
   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. 1967, Bent J. Muus, The Fauna of Danish Estuaries and Lagoons, page 87
   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. 2013, Brian R. Moss, Ecology of Fresh Waters: A View for the Twenty-First Century
   Freshwaters are portrayed in many artforms, including books such as Kenneth Grahame's childrens' story Wind in the Willows. 2015, Sophie Lake, Durwyn Liley, Robert Still, Britain's Habitats
2. Alternative spelling of fresh water
   Schematic diagram of the viscosity effect during the injection of freshwater. 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
   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. 2002, Friedrich A. Schott, Physical Oceanography of the Indian Ocean During WOCE, page 1246
   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). 2011, Guy Levy, P. Fine, A. Bar-Tal, Treated Wastewater in Agriculture
   Alewives are anadromous fish: Born in freshwater, they spend their lives in the ocean, returning annually to their birthplaces to spawn. 20 April 2014, Richard Conniff, “An evolutionary family drama”, in The New York Times