brackish

UK/ˈbɹækɪʃ/US/ˈbɹækɪʃ/

adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,109 of 15,258mostly written

Brackish means slightly salty and unpleasant to drink. Brackish water, a brackish pool, the well turned brackish.

It names a real category rather than a vague complaint: brackish water sits between fresh and sea water in salinity, and estuaries and mangroves are brackish by nature. Rising seas are turning coastal wells brackish in many places. The word came from Dutch.

Definitions of brackish

1adjectivebrackishSlightly salty and unpleasant to drink.C1
“The well water was brackish, so we had to bring drinking water from town.”

brackish is a quality of water.

Where it comes from

From Dutch brak, salty or brackish, plus -ish.

Middle Dutch
brac — brackish
English, today
brackish

From Scottish brack (from Middle Dutch brac (“brackish”)) -ish. Cognate with Dutch brak (“brackish”), German Low German brack, brakerg, brakig (“brackish”), German brackig (“brackish”), Danish brak (“brackish”), Swedish bräck (“brackish”), Norwegian brakk (“brackish”). Perhaps a distant a doublet of brook.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

brackish in the wild

Thus, brackish covers a range of salinity regimes and is not considered a precisely defined condition.
Brackish water
On the United States Geological Survey (USGS) salinity scale, saline water is saltier than brackish water, but less salty than brine.
Saline water
A brackish-water aquarium is an aquarium where the water is brackish (semi-salty).
Brackish-water aquarium
Salt pannes and pools are water retaining depressions located within salt and brackish marshes.
Salt pannes and pools
Brackish plants are known to occur in brackish water.
List of brackish aquarium plant species

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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