The everyday reading of this character is bó, to moor or to park. Read pō it is a noun, a body of standing water, and it turns up almost only inside compounds: 湖泊 lakes, 血泊 a pool of blood.
usage
Old place names keep this reading, among them 罗布泊, the dried-up salt lake in Xinjiang. In modern writing 湖泊 is the standard collective word for lakes in geography and news reports.
Three water drops on the left, the side-form of 水, and the indexing radical. For this reading it does the real work: a 泊 is standing water, which groups it with 湖 (lake) and 海 (sea).
Right side 白 is the phonetic. It fits the bó reading closely and this pō reading only loosely, the usual pattern when one graph ends up carrying two readings. The white meaning plays no part.
In Pop Culture
梁山泊Liángshān Pō
Liangshan Marsh
Legendary outlaw hideout in the classic novel Water Margin
