The story
- Kazakh · derived fromарал“an island”
- English todayAral Sea
From Kazakh арал (aral, “an island”), referring to the more than 1,500 islands that once dotted its waters.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Aral Sea
Today it means: A saline lake, straddling the Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan border, that was once large, but shrank to a quarter of its original size after the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, which previously flowed into it, were diverted for irrigation purposes during the Soviet era. Full definition →
Kazakh арал