creek1
/kriːk
/noun chiefly British
1A narrow, sheltered waterway, especially an inlet in a shoreline or channel in a marsh: a sandy beach in a sheltered creek...
- Coastal migrants can often be found along tidal creeks, salt marsh edges, and mudflats, rarely on sandy ocean beaches.
- Between the cliffs and the sea, the rhythmic movement of the tides is forming a new tidal marsh that includes mudflats, tidal creeks, tidal marshes, and tracts of shrubs.
- Pristine beaches, maritime forests, shimmering marshes, and tidal creeks await your exploration.
Synonyms
tidal inlet, inlet, arm of the sea, estuary, bay, bight, fjord, gulf, sound;
Scottish firth, frith;
in Orkney & Shetland voe
technical ria
rare fleet, armlet
1.1North American & Australian /NZ A stream or minor tributary of a river: [in place names]: he drove into Adam’s Creek...
- They rested by a small creek running through the woods that had started to become more profuse.
- The seven men had spread out and were riding along the dry creek bed.
- Her lion tail flicked idly behind her as she walked towards the nearby creek.
Synonyms
stream, rivulet, brook, river, tributary, backwater
Phrases
be up the creek
be up shit creek
Origin
Middle English: from Old French crique or from Old Norse kriki 'nook'; perhaps reinforced by Middle Dutch krēke; of unknown ultimate origin.
Rhymes
Creek2
/kriːk/noun (plural same)
1A member of a confederacy of American Indian peoples of the south-eastern US in the 16th to 19th centuries; their descendants now live mainly in Oklahoma.Joan Hill is a Creek / Cherokee painter who has received numerous recognition awards, grants, and fellowships in the art world....
- And there is the tale of Jimmy Crowe, a Creek Indian from Okfuskee County, Okla., who, as a teenager, works for the Mennonites as a carpenter and subsequently becomes a preacher.
- Born to a Creek mother and Shawnee father at Old Piqua, a Shawnee village on the Mad River in Ohio, Tecumseh was raised by an older sister and grew to manhood during the border warfare of the Revolutionary Era.
2 [mass noun] The Muskogean language that was spoken by members of the Creek confederacy.It has Slovak, Inuit, Creek, and Italian, but its all Greek to me.
adjective
Relating to or denoting the Creek or their language.In 1814, a Creek faction, the Red Sticks, rose against settlers in the South but was crushed by General Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Alabama....
- With the help of a Creek student named James Perryman, Presbyterian minister John Fleming created a phonetic alphabet for Muskogee.
- After three decades the divisions between those of the traditional and new orders erupted in a Creek civil war.
Origin
From creek, because they lived beside the waterways of the flatlands of Georgia and Alabama.