Skip to main content
Cape Cod Bay

Cape Cod Bay

3.5
A large bay off the coast of Massachusetts in the United States
  • proper noun
  • /keɪp kɒd beɪ/
translation icon : Bahía de Cabo Cod
  • Sunsets over Cape Cod Bay are often breathtaking.

Examples

  • The beaches along Cape Cod Bay are popular destinations for summer tourists.

  • I love visiting Cape Cod Bay in the summer.

  • Fishing is a traditional industry in Cape Cod Bay.

  • Have you ever sailed in Cape Cod Bay?

  • Winds from spring northeasters forced the bloom to hug the coast, driving it into the shellfish grounds of Cape Cod Bay.

  • The seashore includes 43,000 acres bounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and Cape Cod Bay to the west.

  • Each fall, typically by late October, Kemp's ridleys and other sea turtles start washing up on the 50-mile-long shoreline along Cape Cod Bay between Sandy Neck and Provincetown.

Surface Forms

Morphology

cape + Cod + bay

The name 'Cape Cod Bay' is transparently compositional: it denotes the bay associated with Cape Cod, so a learner who knows 'cape' (promontory) and 'bay' (coastal inlet) can infer it is the bay by Cape Cod. Place-name combinations of a geographic name plus a geographic feature are cross-linguistically common, making this easily comprehensible to B1 learners.

Etymology

Cape Cod Bay comes from the nearby headland Cape Cod. The word cape means 'a point of land' and cod is a 'type of fish', and because early English sailors found many cod there, the bay beside that cape became known as Cape Cod Bay.