Cove, Creek, Cutoff: Origins, Forms, Histories of Words Meaning River, Lake

The natural features of a region are its topography (Greek topos, "place").

Rivers, lakes, and related freshwater bodies are among the most important topographic features. Many words pertaining to freshwater features have little-known meanings and/or colorful etymologies.

In the current alphabetic series of such terms, here are the origins, forms, and histories of cove, creek, and cutoff. The dates of forms and meanings come from the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

Cove
Modern English cove comes from Middle English cove (14th century), from Old English cofa (before 12th century). The word is akin to Old High German chubisi ("hut"), Old Norse kufr ("heap"), and Greek gype ("cave").

The original, now obsolete, meaning of cove is a small room (before 12th century). Another early sense, now dialectal in Scotland and northern England, is a natural cave, den, or hollow in a rocky area (before 12th century).

Eventually those senses of cove were extended to include a similar concavity of water, specifically a small sheltered inlet or bay (1590).

Creek
Modern English creek (16th century) comes from Middle English creke (14th century) and crike (13th century), from Old Norse -kriki ("concavity, bend, bay").

The word creek has two principal meanings.

One is a narrow recess in the shore of a sea, a lake, a river, or a tidal estuary of a river (13th century). A creek is generally distinguished from a cove by being narrower and extending farther inland. This sense is chiefly British, though there are some remnants of it in America because of its use by English settlers early in American history.

In the United States, the word creek mainly denotes a natural stream of water usually smaller than, and often tributary to, a river (17th century).

Cutoff
Cutoff entered English in the 18th century as a simple combination of the verb cut and the adverb off.

The original meaning of cutoff is an act of cutting off or a portion of anything cut off (1741).

The new and relatively short passage of water formed when a stream cuts through the neck of a bend is known as a cutoff (1773). When such a new passage arises, silting often completely seals off the old bend from the new course of the river, thus forming a crescent-shaped lake, also called a cutoff.
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Encyclopaedia Britannica Ready Reference 2004. CD-ROM. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2004.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. 11th ed. Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 2006.

Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary. 3rd ed. Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 2007.

The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1989.