via Strange Maps Blog
“A body of running water may be called any of many different names, the most generic being
stream, the most common being
river. A
river can be defined as ‘a natural stream of water of usually considerable volume’. General terms for smaller streams include
creek (smaller than a river) and
brook (smaller than a creek). Very specific types of water currents include
anabranches (river branches that rejoin the main body of water) and
distributaries (branches that don’t).
This map charts the rich variety of waterflow toponyms in the US, which reflects the climatological and geographical diversity of the country, but also its linguistic and historical heritage. River names seem extremely resistant to change, and indeed often are echoes of earlier dominant cultures.
The colors on the map, which is based on the place names in the USGS National Hydrography Dataset, correspond to the generic toponyms for waterflows, excluding the two commonest ones (
river and
creek, rendered in gray).
The term
brook (light blue) is massively prevalent throughout New England, and into northern New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It is interspersed with
stream (light green) in Maine, the only place in the country where that term is used with any frequency; and with
kill (dark blue) in New York state’s Hudson valley - the occurrence of that Dutch-derived term coinciding somewhat with the former Dutch colony of New Netherland. Pennsylvania, Maryland, northern Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio are dominated by the
run (pink)…”
Read the rest here, see the map large here, and visit Derek Watkins site here.
