Baffin Bay
1
6.8
- proper noun
- The wildlife in and around Baffin Bay attracts many nature enthusiasts and scientists.
Examples
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Many ships navigate through Baffin Bay to reach the Arctic waters each year.
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But for now she can pretend that she is queen again, that the trees are full of owls and the body of water is her own Baffin Bay.
Fiction book (1998) -
Baffin Bay.
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From Baffin Bay to Island Lake and onward to the great expanse of Lake Ontario, she leads the way.
Fiction book (1998) -
We were after whales in Baffin Bay, and we had anchored off what is now known as Thule—the furthest point off the North coast of Greenland a big ship can sail.
Fiction book (1998) -
The researchers studied the ice conditions in Baffin Bay during the winter months.
Surface Forms
Morphology
Baffin + bay
Baffin is a proper name without independent lexical meaning, but the constituent 'bay' clearly denotes a coastal inlet; a B1 learner who knows 'bay' will infer this is a bay called Baffin. The proper-name + geographic-feature pattern is cross-linguistically common, so the basic category meaning is transparent even though exact geographic details cannot be derived from the words alone.
Etymology
The name Baffin Bay comes from the English explorer William Baffin, who sailed and mapped the area in the early 1600s. People used his name for the big, icy bay he showed on maps, so today Baffin Bay means 'the large icy sea between Greenland and Canada'.