Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
Sacramento River

Sacramento River

1 2.5
A long river in northern California that starts near Mount Shasta and flows to San Francisco Bay
  • proper noun
  • /sækrəˈmɛntoʊ ˈrɪvər/
translation icon : Río Sacramento
  • upper Sacramento River
  • Sacramento River tributary
  • salmon in the Sacramento River

Examples

  • Home is Rio Vista by the Sacramento River, which has a population of just over 3,000.

    Fiction book (1996)

  • The Sacramento River flows southward from Mount Shasta and is vital for the region's ecosystem.

  • Many tourists enjoy canoeing along the Sacramento River during the summer months.

  • The Sacramento River provides drinking water to millions of residents in Northern California.

Surface Forms

Sacramento River main

Morphology

Sacramento + river

This is a compositional place-name + generic noun construction: if a B1 learner knows the proper name 'Sacramento' and the noun 'river', they can readily infer it denotes the river associated with Sacramento. Proper names are referential rather than idiomatic and the pattern 'Place + river' is cross-linguistically common, so the meaning is transparent to learners who know both constituents.

Etymology

Sacramento River was named by early Spanish explorers. They called the river Sacramento after the Catholic 'Most Holy Sacrament', so the river keeps that Spanish, religious name today.