Bay of Bengal
1
2.5
- proper noun
:
Bahía de Bengala
- Instead, I viewed it rise over the Bay of Bengal from the beach, sitting on a rickety old boat that was docked on the sand.
Examples
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Major flooding in the Bay of Bengal has been attributed to deforestation in Tibet.
Blog text (23) -
Furthermore, Indian maritime security specialists have expressed misgivings about the Chinese development of an electronic eavesdropping facility a mere 30 nautical miles from the Indian-controlled Andaman Islands chain in the Bay of Bengal.
Academic text (1997) -
First Lane, the clouds are flying south toward the swirling Bay of Bengal.
Fiction book (2002) -
The plane came down over the jumbled spread of Madras, a port city on the Bay of Bengal.
Fiction book (1993) -
He dreamed of dramatic storms over the Bay of Bengal.
Fiction book (2002) -
Pondicherry was about 150 kilometers south of Madras, on the Bay of Bengal.
Fiction book (1993) -
He described Roman trade voyages into the Bay of Bengal that attempted to reach Burma and Malaysia.
Academic text (2010) -
Satellite pictures had shown a tight, smoky swirl like the negative image of a furiously spinning chakra out in the Bay of Bengal.
Fiction book (2002) -
On May 2, 2008, a strengthening Cyclone Nargis came off the warm waters of the Bay of Bengal and pummeled central Burma, causing what would become the worst natural disaster in the country's history.
Blog text (22) -
A massive search operation is underway for a plane in India that went missing over the Bay of Bengal on Friday.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'bay' (coastal inlet) + 'of' (belonging to) + 'Bengal' (the geographic region) yields a bay located by/in Bengal, which a B1 learner who knows the constituents can infer. This type of place-name formation is cross-linguistically common and non-idiomatic, so the expression is immediately comprehensible from its parts.
Etymology
Bay of Bengal is a literal place name: a bay is a curve of the sea and it lies next to the land called Bengal. Because many big rivers flow into it and it sits beside India, Bangladesh and Myanmar, the name simply describes the large bay there.