- 1沼澤水道（美國南方、尤其路易斯安那的緩流河汊；台灣日常幾乎不說，課本有時寫「河汊」或直接留 bayou）
A bayou is a slow body of water in the south-east of the United States, especially in Louisiana. The water barely seems to move. Plants grow thick in it and along the banks, so it can look like a lazy river, a marsh, or a still lake with a path through trees. People who live there use the word in place names and in everyday talk; outside that region it paints a picture of heat, muddy water, and wild life. It is not a fast mountain river, and it is not the sea. Though actually not every wet place in the American South is a bayou — the word belongs to that low, slow, plant-heavy water, and English borrowed both the water and the name from that corner of the country.
From the word’s history
From Louisiana French bayou, from Choctaw bayuk 'creek'.
借自路易斯安那法語 bayou，源自喬克托語 bayuk「小溪」。
組成English took it from Louisiana French bayou, from Choctaw bayuk, “a creek”. The same source also gave English the rare word bogue — a doublet, meaning two words that arrived by different roads from one start.
同家族的字
- boguea rare doublet from the same Choctaw word, also a kind of creek
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Bayouname
- 1
A surname.
bayounoun/ˈbaɪ.(j)uː/
- 1
A slow-moving, often stagnant creek or river.
- You natural persons old and young! / You on the Mississippi and on all the branches and bayous of the Mississippi! / You friendly boatmen and mechanics! you roughs!
- 2
A swamp; a marshy (stagnant) body of water.
- At that time I had no staff officer who could be trusted with that duty. In the woods, at a short distance below the clearing, I found a depression, dry at the time, but which at high water became a slough or bayou.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。