Library / English Dictionary

BROOK

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (noun) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

A natural stream of water smaller than a river (and often a tributary of a river)

Example:

the creek dried up every summer

Synonyms:

brook; creek

Classified under:

Nouns denoting natural objects (not man-made)

Hypernyms ("brook" is a kind of...):

stream; watercourse (a natural body of running water flowing on or under the earth)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "brook"):

brooklet (a small brook)

Instance hyponyms:

Bull Run (a creek in northeastern Virginia where two battles were fought in the American Civil War)

Aegospotami; Aegospotamos (a creek emptying into the Hellespont in present-day Turkey; at its mouth in 405 BC the Spartan fleet under Lysander defeated the Athenians and ended the Peloponnesian War)

 II. (verb) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

Put up with something or somebody unpleasant

Example:

She stuck out two years in a miserable marriage

Synonyms:

abide; bear; brook; digest; endure; put up; stand; stick out; stomach; suffer; support; tolerate

Classified under:

Verbs of thinking, judging, analyzing, doubting

Hypernyms (to "brook" is one way to...):

allow; countenance; let; permit (consent to, give permission)

Verb group:

suffer (experience (emotional) pain)

Troponyms (each of the following is one way to "brook"):

accept; live with; swallow (tolerate or accommodate oneself to)

hold still for; stand for (tolerate or bear)

bear up (endure cheerfully)

take lying down (suffer without protest; suffer or endure passively)

take a joke (listen to a joke at one's own expense)

sit out (endure to the end)

pay (bear (a cost or penalty), in recompense for some action)

Sentence frames:

Somebody ----s something
Somebody ----s somebody

Sentence example:

Sam cannot brook Sue

Credits

 Context examples: 

I thought of the life that lay before me—your life, sir—an existence more expansive and stirring than my own: as much more so as the depths of the sea to which the brook runs are than the shallows of its own strait channel.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

The general, accustomed on every ordinary occasion to give the law in his family, prepared for no reluctance but of feeling, no opposing desire that should dare to clothe itself in words, could ill brook the opposition of his son, steady as the sanction of reason and the dictate of conscience could make it.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

It sounded like the gurgling of a brook over mossy stones in some quiet dell, and the crooning song of it lured me away and out of myself till I was no longer Hump the cabin-boy, nor Van Weyden, the man who had dreamed away thirty-five years among books.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Mine is no squalor of song that cannot transmute itself, with proper exchange value, into a flower-crowned cottage, a sweet mountain- meadow, a grove of redwoods, an orchard of thirty-seven trees, one long row of blackberries and two short rows of strawberries, to say nothing of a quarter of a mile of gurgling brook.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

The transiting moon will be in Scorpio, which spells a yearning for privacy, so choose a charming bed-and-breakfast inn situated in or near a forest and also near water, such as a stream, lake, inlet, or babbling brook.

(AstrologyZone.com, by Susan Miller)

There was field upon field of ripening grain, with well-paved roads running between, and pretty rippling brooks with strong bridges across them.

(The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum)

I continued three days feeding on oysters and limpets, to save my own provisions; and I fortunately found a brook of excellent water, which gave me great relief.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Down the hill they thundered, over the brook and up to the scene of the contest.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

It would have been all over with her, likewise, if, by good fortune, a tailor who was travelling in search of work, had not sat down to rest by the brook.

(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)

This was the forest near Ingolstadt; and here I lay by the side of a brook resting from my fatigue, until I felt tormented by hunger and thirst.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)