@@marahsarie replied to your photo “What do you call a body of water that’s smaller than a river but...”
Brook, Creek, or Stream are all used for small bodies of water smaller than a river, but no one agrees on how to differentiate them. *I* think of a brook as like, very clear water burbling through a forest. A creek would be larger, a stream is kind of indeterminate size.
@marahsarie replied to your photo “What do you call a body of water that’s smaller than a river but...”
So yeah, I think stream is maybe the most generic word, if that's what you're looking for?
Oh, bugger. So it is just as messy and as indeterminate as I thought. I was actually looking for something really specific and not generic, for narrative purposes. As in, at the beginning of the story it’s a shallow stream where the actual deep bits are about five metres wide, with some puddle-deep water around the banks of it. Something a teenaged girl can fall into (at the bank) without drowning or anything, just getting her clothes wet, but if you go further into the middle of it, it’s deep enough that a grown man prefers to swim across it rather than wade (although I expect that if he did, the water would still reach up to his shoulders).
So would that be a brook or a river already?
 As to “stream...” it’s even more adjective-y than “rivulet,” isn’t it? I think of “brook” as being something fairly small, but Google showed me all those brooks that were several feet wide. I wonder if there is some kind of official classification for these by the forestry departments of different countries or something? Because you’d think?
