Other forms: brooks, brooking
A brook is a small stream. A babbling brook, cross the brook, a brook at the bottom of the field.
It is one of a long list of English words for running water that vary by region — brook, beck, burn, stream, rill and creek all mean roughly the same thing in different counties and countries. Beck is northern, burn is Scottish, and brook is southern and midland. There is a separate verb brook meaning to tolerate, used almost only in the negative: brook no argument.
1nounbrookA small stream.
“A little brook ran along the bottom of the garden.”
2verbtolerateTo tolerate, used in the negative.
“The headmistress would brook no nonsense from her pupils.”
brook is a small stream or a tolerating.
The noun and the verb are unrelated. Old English broc was the stream, and brucan, to enjoy or use, gave the verb — which is why brook no nonsense has nothing to do with water.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰrewHg-
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰruHg- — to enjoy
Proto-Germanic
*brūkaną — to enjoy, use
Proto-West Germanic
*brūkan
Old English
brūcan — to enjoy, brook, use, possess, partake of, spend
Middle English
brouken — to use, enjoy
English, today
brook
From Middle English brouken (“to use, enjoy”), from Old English brūcan (“to enjoy, brook, use, possess, partake of, spend”), from Proto-West Germanic brūkan, from Proto-Germanic brūkaną (“to enjoy, use”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰruHg- (“to enjoy”). Cognate with stq bruke (“to need”), Dutch bruiken (“to use”), German Low German bruken (“to need”), German brauchen (“to need”), Swedish bruka (“to use”), Icelandic brúka (“to use”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Farm & Countryside