A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
brook
A small stream — smaller than a creek in most American usage, and in England the ordinary southern word for what the north calls a beck and Scotland calls a burn. A brook is something you step over rather than wade, running clear over gravel with the bank vegetation meeting overhead in summer.
Etymology
Old English brōc, and like brine it is a puzzle. It has Germanic relatives — Dutch broek, German bruch — but they mean marsh or fen rather than running water, which suggests the older sense was wet ground generally and English narrowed it to the channel through it. Beyond Germanic there is nothing certain.
Notes
The verb to brook, as in to brook no argument, is a completely separate word, from Old English brūcan, to use or enjoy — related to German brauchen and to Latin frui, from which English also gets fruit. English has been keeping these two apart for a thousand years without effort.