creek
/ˈkɹiːk/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: 4.37 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A small inlet, often saltwater, leading to the sea or to the main channel of a river, especially a river estuary.
British usage
noun
A stream of water, typically a stream of freshwater smaller than a river; in Australia, also used of river-sized bodies of water.
Australian usage; Canadian usage; New Zealand usage; American usage
noun
One of a Native American tribe from the Southeastern United States, also known as the Muscogee.
name
The Muskogean language of the Creek tribe.
name
A surname.
adj
Of or pertaining to the Creek tribe.
Example Sentences
- "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."
- "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."
- "Revis, who moved to Macon two-and-a half years ago to work on the park effort, noted that after the Muscogee (Creek) were removed to Oklahoma, the site became a slave plantation."
- "The chieftain was well versed in Creek history."
- "For at least a decade, people on the internet have been drawing fan art of the love between this two characters (a ship known as "Creek"). A cursory search of DeviantArt shows Creek art dating back to 2005. And when Trey Parker and Matt Stone decided it was finally time to acknowledge Creek and their surprisingly robust online fandom, they went straight to the source, soliciting real drawings from users online."
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).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Usage
- British usage
- Australian usage
- Canadian usage
- New Zealand usage
- American usage
- Slang
Inflected Forms
creeks (plural)
crick (alternative, Canada)
crike (alternative, UK)
cryke (alternative, UK)
crik (alternative, pronunciation spelling)
Derived Forms
Phrases
Acacia Creek
Albany Creek
Alice Creek
Alligator Creek
Alumy Creek
Amamoor Creek
Anna Creek
Antietam Creek