Stream - Types

Types

River
A large natural stream, which may be a waterway.
Creek
  • In North America, Australia and New Zealand, a small to medium sized natural stream. Sometimes navigable by motor craft and may be intermittent.
  • In parts of New England, the UK and India, a tidal inlet, typically in a salt marsh or mangrove swamp, or between enclosed and drained former salt marshes or swamps (e.g. Port Creek separating Portsea Island from the mainland). In these cases, the stream is the tidal stream, the course of the seawater through the creek channel at low and high tide.
Tributary
A contributory stream, or a stream which does not reach the sea but joins another river (a parent river). Sometimes also called a branch or fork.
Brook
A stream smaller than a creek, especially one that is fed by a spring or seep. It is usually small and easily forded. A brook is characterized by its shallowness and its bed being composed primarily of rocks.
Runnel
the linear channel between the parallel ridges or bars on a shoreline beach or river floodplain, or between a bar and the shore. Also called a swale.

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    —Michael Blankfort. Lewis Milestone. Johnson (Reginald Gardner)

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    “As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
    —Saul Bellow (b. 1915)