The Creek Journal: Creek: Meditation on a Word

It wasn't until about the age of the Pilgrims in America (the 1620s) that the word came refer to a small stream or brook. Before that time, the word "creke" meant something like a narrow inlet in a coastline. It's all a chain of etymological guesses, but it appears that this word is related to "crook," calling attention to this body of water that's full of bends and turns.
As for "stream," it appears that this word derives from the Old French root "rheum," itself from "rheuma," the Greek word for stream or a current or anything flowing. So we end up with other Greek words such as rhythmos, meaning rhythm or rhytos, meaning a liquid or fluid. The Polish word for brook is strumyk. "That which flows" is the Rhine.
In the ancient Sanskrit, rivus meant "stream." In the 1500's the Italian word rivoletto flowed from out of the Latin rivus (think of "rivulet" and "river") which directly copied the Sanskrit. In the same century, this rivus led unexpectedly to our word "rival." The idea here is that a rivalis was originally "one who uses the same stream" (or "one on the opposite side of the stream").
And it's likely this root word led to another favorite word of ours: "rill." A rill is nothing more than a small brook.
As for a "brook," another kind of small stream, the German and Dutch equivalents (Bruch and broek) both have the sense of a marsh. In parts of England, a brook means a "water-meadow."
So a creek. Or brook. Or stream. Or rill, river, wash, rivulet, runnel, run, burn, beck, branch, kill, syke, bayou, and lick. The modern Dutch word for things like creeks is kil, and from this we got part of the bizarre word for what was once the largest landfill in the world: Fresh Kills, on the western part of Staten Island, where about one third of the debris from Ground Zero was taken to be sorted through. 4257 pieces of human remains were found and identified there beside the Fresh Kills Estuary.
A "lick." This is something between being a stream and a rill, the latter being essentially the first stage of a stream when water is just beginning to erode a path through dirt or rock. And this being the case, a lick is more of an ephemeral stream. Hamilton Creek is an ephemeral stream if there was ever any doubt, but still it's not quite as temporary as a lick.
Now, our humble Creek is all a creek should be except that it hasn't any water.
So below we enjoy other streams.