creek – English noun declension

English noun forms of creek

Noun: creek
Singularcreek
Pluralcreeks

Sample 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. [1853, John Ruskin, “Torcello”, in The Stones of Venice, volume II (The Sea-Stories), London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, § I, page 11:]
  • 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. [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:]
  • 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. [1997, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 67, in Mason & Dixon, 1st US edition, New York: Henry Holt and Company, →ISBN, part Two: America, page 650:]

Etymology

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. 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). See: Middle English Nouns 'crike', Old Norse Nouns 'kriki', Old Norse Nouns 'kraki', Dutch Nouns 'kreek', French Nouns 'crique'.

Verbs referencing "creek"

French Nouns crique.