Bay of Biscay
1
4.4
- proper noun
:
Bahía de Bizkaia
- During our cruise, we passed by the stunning coastline along the Bay of Biscay.
- storm in the Bay of Biscay
Examples
-
When my parents informed me that I was to cross the Bay of Biscay, I trembled.
Fiction book (1999) -
We were entering the Bay of Biscay.
-
There seems some doom over the ship, already a hand short entering the Bay of Biscay with wild weather ahead.
-
A powerful storm in the Bay of Biscay threatened to sink Cleopatra.
Academic text (2002) -
Along the way, the leading Spanish ships were rocked by a cyclonic depression off the Bay of Biscay and, three days later, the rearmost ships were battered on the rocks off the shores of Ireland.
Blog text (8) -
The ship sailed smoothly into the Bay of Biscay, famous for its turbulent waters.
-
Many fishing boats operate in the Bay of Biscay, taking advantage of its rich marine life.
Surface Forms
Morphology
bay + of + Biscay
The noun 'bay' (coastal inlet) combined with the preposition 'of' plus a place name is fully compositional: a B1 learner who knows 'bay' and understands 'of' will infer this is a bay associated with 'Biscay'. Even if the learner does not know the exact geographic location of Biscay, the structure and meaning (a coastal inlet named for a place) are transparent and cross-linguistically common.
Etymology
The name Bay of Biscay comes from the coastal area called Biscay. Long ago, sailors called the sea next to that land the bay of Biscay, so today the name means the large part of the Atlantic next to north Spain and west France.