Other forms: creeks
A creek is a small stream, or a narrow inlet of the sea. Up the creek, a tidal creek, a creek in the woods.
The two senses split by country: in Britain a creek is a narrow tidal inlet and in America and Australia it is a small stream. Up the creek without a paddle means in serious trouble. Note that the word probably comes from a Norse word meaning a nook or bend.
1nouncreekA small stream, or a narrow inlet of the sea.
“The children waded in the shallow creek, looking for frogs.”
creek is a watercourse.
Middle English crike probably comes from Old Norse kriki, a nook or bend, from a root meaning to turn.
Middle Dutch
krēke
Proto-Indo-European
*ger- — to turn, to wind
Proto-Germanic
*krikjô
Old Norse
kriki
Middle English
crike
English, today
creek
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 creke) either reflects open-syllable lengthening of Middle English or reborrowing from Middle Dutch krēke., Compare typologically 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 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).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire