riverbed

UK/ˈɹɪv.əˌbɛd/US/ˈɹɪv.ɚˌbɛd/

nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,079 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: riverbeds

A riverbed is the ground a river runs along. A dry riverbed, walk the riverbed, gravel in the riverbed.

A dry one is dangerous to camp in, because rain miles upstream can fill it without any warning where you are. The material tells you the speed of the water: fast rivers leave boulders and slow ones leave silt.

Definitions of riverbed

1nounriverbedThe ground a river runs along.B1+
“The children waded into the shallow water and found smooth stones on the riverbed.”

riverbed is a ground.

Where it comes from

River plus bed, on the same pattern as the compound in Dutch and German.

From river + bed. Compare Dutch rivierbedding (“riverbed”), German Flussbett (“riverbed”), Swedish flodbädd (“riverbed”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Nature & Weather

Practise this word

riverbed in the wild

A part of the riverbed was separated from the reservoir by dams, creating a new riverbed.
Kazanka (river)
The Tekapo River flows occasionally through the Mackenzie Basin, Canterbury, in New Zealand's South Island, although the riverbed is now often dry in the upper reaches.
Tekapo River
The riverbed itself also suffered major destruction, now being replaced by mounds of rock, rather than soil and trees.
Elbow Falls
The Beijing municipal government has invested 16 billion yuan in an effort to replace the riverbed with parkland or smaller bodies of water.
Yongding River
During the rainy season, the river virtually cuts the town of Narus in two as the riverbed fills and sometimes floods.
Narus River, Kapoeta

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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