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brook

verbnounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//bɹɵk//
  • Australia//bɹʊk//
  • Scotland//bɾʉk//
  • //bɾʊk//

To bear; endure; support; put up with; tolerate.

verb

  1. 1

    To bear; endure; support; put up with; tolerate.

    brook no refusal

    I will not brook any disobedience.

    I will brook no impertinence.

    how shall I brook to be the first cause of difference between a father and son, to whom the averted look and the harsh word have been hitherto unknown?

  2. 2

    To enjoy the use of; make use of; profit by; to use, enjoy, possess, or hold.

    Yea, my Lord: how brooks your Grace the ayre, / After your late toſſing on the breaking Seas?

    The girl’s spirit would brook a husband under no such conditions: she was not minded to run forward because Pen chose to hold out the handkerchief, and her tone, in reply to Arthur, showed her determination to be independent.

  3. 3

    obsoleteTo earn; deserve.

Etymology

From Middle English brouken (“to use, enjoy”), from Old English brūcan (“to enjoy, brook, use, possess, partake of, spend”), from Proto-West Germanic *brūkan, from Proto-Germanic *brūkaną (“to enjoy, use”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰruHg- (“to enjoy”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian bruke (“to need”), Dutch bruiken (“to use”), German Low German bruken (“to need”), German brauchen (“to need”), Swedish bruka (“to use”), Icelandic brúka (“to use”).

noun

  1. 1

    A body of running water smaller than a river; a small stream.

    empties itself, as doth an inland brook / into the main of waters

    The Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water.

    But then I had the [massive] flintlock by me for protection. ¶[…]The linen-press and a chest on the top of it formed, however, a very good gun-carriage; and, thus mounted, aim could be taken out of the window at the old mare feeding in the meadow below by the brook,[…].

    "Most of them don't wash. Those who do usually plunge their head into some brook or rill, if there happens to be one about."

  2. 2

    A water meadow, or (in the plural) low, marshy ground.

Etymology

From Middle English brook, from Old English brōc (“brook; stream; torrent”), from Proto-West Germanic *brōk (“stream”).

Forms

plural
brooks
past tense
brooked
past participle
brooked
present participle
brooking
third person singular
brooks
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).