creek
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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See also: Creek
Alternative forms
- crick (dialectal North American)
- crik (eye dialect)
Etymology
From Middle English creke, kreke, creake, of unclear origin.
Additional etymological information
It existed alongside a second variant in Middle English cryke, krike, cricke, from Old Norse kriki.[1] The first form possibly continues Old English *creca (attested in the diminutive crecca (“creek, bay, wharf”) also found in Anglo-Latin as creca, crecca), from Proto-West Germanic *krekō, from Proto-Germanic *krekô, *krekuz (“corner, hook, angle, bend, bight”), from Proto-Indo-European *ger- (“to turn, to wind”).
See also Old Dutch creka, crika (“inlet, cove, creek”), Old Norse kriki, krikr (“angle, corner, nook, bight”), Old Norse kraki (“pole with a hook, anchor”), and possibly Old Norse krókr (“hook, bend, bight”). Modern cognates include West Frisian kreek (“creek”), Dutch kreek (“creek, cove, inlet, bight”), and French crique (“cove”) (borrowed from Germanic).
Early British colonists of Australia and the Americas used the term in the usual British way, to name inlets; as settlements followed the inlets upstream and inland, the names were retained and creek came to be used to refer to any small waterway.[2] A similar semantic development occurred in Dutch and French, where the word originally meant "bay" but came to mean "stream" especially in the French and Dutch colonies (French Guiana, Dutch Guiana and Indonesia).[3]
Pronunciation
- (Received Pronunciation) enPR: krēk IPA(key): /kɹiːk/
- (US) IPA(key): /kɹik/, (Appalachia) /kɹɪk/
- (Canada) IPA(key): /kɹiːk/
Audio (US): (file) Audio (US, Appalachia): (file) Audio (General Australian): (file) Audio (General Australian): (file) - Rhymes: -iːk, -ɪk
- Homophones: creak, crick
Noun
creek (plural creeks)
- (British) A small inlet, often saltwater, leading to the sea or to the main channel of a river, especially a river estuary.
- 1853, John Ruskin, “Torcello”, in The Stones of Venice, volume II (The Sea-Stories), London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, § I, page 11:
- Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which near the city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea.
- 1887 March 21, Rudyard Kipling, “Kidnapped”, in Plain Tales from the Hills, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co.; London: W. Thacker & Co., published 1888, →OCLC, page 111:
- There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken any way you please, is bad, / And strands them in forsaken guts and creeks / No decent soul would think of visiting.
- (British) The inner part of a port that is used as a dock for small boats.
- (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, US) A stream of water, typically a stream of freshwater smaller than a river; in Australia, also used of river-sized bodies of water.
- Hyponym: creeklet
- 1997, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 67, in Mason & Dixon, 1st US edition, New York: Henry Holt and Company, →ISBN, part Two: America, page 650:
- We all feel it Looming, even when we're awake, out there ahead someplace, the way you come to feel a River or Creek ahead, before anything else,— sound, sky, vegetation,— may have announced it.
- Any turn or winding.
Synonyms
Derived terms
- Antietam Creek
- Barking Creek
- Battle Creek
- Bear Creek
- Beavercreek
- Belle Creek
- Big Creek
- Black Creek
- Bow Creek
- Chinle Creek
- Clear Creek
- Coal Creek
- Coconut Creek
- Cooper's Creek
- creekbank
- creekbed
- creek bed
- creek boat
- creeker
- creekfish
- creekfront
- creekless
- creeklet
- creekline
- Creekmouth
- creek plum
- creekside
- creekward, creekwards
- creekwater
- creeky
- Cripple Creek
- Crooked Creek
- Cross Creek
- Dawson Creek
- Dead Nigger Creek
- Deer Creek
- dry creek
- God willing and the creek don't rise
- Haw Creek
- Honey Creek
- Kings Creek
- Laguña Creek
- Licking Creek
- Lord willing and the creek don't rise
- Lost Creek
- Maple Creek
- Martins Creek
- Mill Creek
- Miry Creek
- Mole Creek
- Oak Creek
- Old Mill Creek
- Otter Creek
- Paint Creek
- Panther Creek
- Pincher Creek
- Pipe Creek
- Plunketts Creek
- Prairie Creek
- Pryor Creek
- Rock Creek
- run like a dry creek
- Salt Creek
- Silver Creek
- Soochow Creek
- subcreek
- Suzhou Creek
- Swan Creek
- Tennant Creek
- up a creek
- up a creek without a paddle
- upcreek
- up poo creek
- up shit creek
- up shit creek without a paddle
- up shit's creek
- up shit's creek without a paddle
- up the creek
- up the creek without a paddle
- Vance Creek
- Werris Creek
- Whiska Creek
- Wise Creek
- Wood Creek
- Woody Creek
Descendants
Translations
small inlet or bay
|
stream of water
|
- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
References
- “creek”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
- Barry Lopez, Debra Gwartney, Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape →ISBN, page 92: "Creek is a word that has been transformed by the North American continent. The British usage of the term was its first meaning here, and this definition still applies along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Maine: a saltwater inlet narrower than a cove; the estuary of a stream. But as settlement probed inland beyond the coastal plain, following watercourses upstream well past the influence of salt and tides, the word creek held on for any flow..."
- Edwin Wallace McMullen, Names New and Old: Papers of the Names Institute (2002), page 137: "in French Guiana its [the word crique's] frequent occurrence is for streams without regard to tidewater and no estuarine application has been noted, and it occurs in both estuarine and stream senses in Madagascar. The word has come into American Spanish in the same spelling as the French, crique. The [...] Diccionarie de Americanismos by Malaret does [list it], etymologizing [it] from [the English word] and defining it as hondo (coastal water body) or riachuelo (stream). Usage in names in the BGN gazetteers of Guatemala, British Honduras, Honduras and Argentina is predominantly for streams; and though they may be tidal the estuarine or bay sense has not been recorded there. Dutch kreek is defined in van Gelderen's Duitsch Woordenboek as a small bay. In this language, too, colonial usage in Dutch Guiana and Indonesia went to the stream connotation."
Anagrams
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