creek

nouncommon in dialogue

//ˈkɹiːk//
/[kʰɹʷɪi̯k]/

A small inlet, often saltwater, leading to the sea or to the main channel of a river, especially a river estuary.

noun

1
A small inlet, often saltwater, leading to the sea or to the main channel of a river, especially a river estuary.
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.
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.
2
The inner part of a port that is used as a dock for small boats.
3
A stream of water, typically a stream of freshwater smaller than a river; in Australia, also used of river-sized bodies of water.
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.
4
Any turn or winding.

Etymology

From Middle English crike, probably from Old Norse kriki, from Proto-Germanic *krikjô, variant of krekô, from Proto-Indo-European *ger- (“to turn, to wind”); the modern form creek (already late Middle English creke) either reflects open-syllable lengthening of Middle English /i/ or reborrowing from Middle Dutch krēke., Compare typologically English bight, akin to bend, bow. See also Old Dutch creka, crika (“inlet, cove, creek”), Medieval Latin creca, crica, kríkr (“angle, corner, nook, bay”), 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. 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).

Forms

plural: creeks

Credit · A surname.creed · That which is believed; accepted doctrine, especially…Creed · A surname from Old English.

creek · A small inlet, often saltwater, leading to the sea or to the main channel of a river, especially a river estuary.

Creek · One of a Native American tribe from the Southeastern United…creep · To move slowly with the abdomen close to the ground.creeping · The act of something that creeps.

The neighbouring pages — Alphabetical 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.