beck

1) A stream.

It is often said that beck is the usual word in those parts of England which were settled by Scandinavians, but the evidence in Yorkshire indicates that in some regions it was used as an alias for ‘brook’ quite late in place-name history: 1526 oon beke or brooke called Ryngheybeke, Farnley

1537 the brook or beck, Calverley. In a boundary description for Hunsworth in 1787 the word ‘brook’ has a line drawn through it and ‘beck’ written above. Indeed, the place-name evidence shows that ‘beck’ successfully ousted ‘brook’ in some cases: for example, the stream that is now generally referred to as Fenay Beck, near Almondbury, was Fenay Brook for much of its history: 1502 ‘a stream called Fyneybroke’. The surname Brook is predominantly a west Yorkshire surname.

spellings brook
dates 1502 1526 1537 1787

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Photo by Kreuzschnabel CC BY-SA 3.0