creekcreek

The story

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. 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).