Brook

How to spell brook

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce brook

What does brook mean?

1. nounA small natural stream of fresh water.
2. verbTo tolerate or put up with something, almost always used in the negative.

Brook in a sentence

• noun

  A narrow brook ran along the edge of the meadow.

• verb

  The manager would not brook any further delays on the project.

• noun

  The children waded across the shallow brook to reach the woods.

• verb

  Her firm tone made clear she would brook no argument.

Where does brook come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Brook descends from the Old English broc, which simply meant a small running stream and is recorded from before the year 1000. The watery sense has close cousins across the Germanic languages, including Dutch broek and German Bruch, several of which carried the related idea of a marsh or low, boggy ground beside flowing water. The very different verb meaning 'to tolerate' comes from a separate Old English word, brucan, meaning 'to use, to enjoy, or to make use of', which over time narrowed into the sense of stomaching or putting up with something, now almost always in the negative ('will not brook'). The two words look identical today purely by accident of sound change, having started life as distinct terms. That shared spelling is the real trap: the silent doubling of the vowel sound and the unrelated meanings make it easy to second-guess. The stream sense survives in many English place names, which is why brook turns up so often on maps.

How the word is built

• brook (single Old English root; no affixes)