The definitions of rivers, creeks, streams, waters, and all of those good terms have typically been very much in the hands of the namers. In Zild, there are some astonishingly badly misnamed watercourses: Rivers which are creeks, creeks which are rivers and what have you. As a personal aside, an ancestor of mine was the Surveyor-General for Otago, and later New Zealand, in the mid to late 1800s. He named perhaps 60% of the rivers, creeks and streams in Otago, an area about the size of South Carolina or West Virginia. He used the words river, stream, creek and what have you with some regard to size. He also went to considerable trouble to find out what the Maori names of the waterways were. In an area called the Maniototo, he named all of the creeks and streams using the Maori nomenclature. However, the Provincial Council (the provinces were self-governing within a federal system at the time) decided it couldn't pronounce the names and told him to go away and rename them to something more "useable". So he named them at a level he believed commensurate with the mental and linguistic abilities of the councillors (some of whom were also my ancestors). Yep, he named them Hogburn, Eweburn, Horseburn, Cowburn, Idaburn, Gimmerburn, Wedderburn, Pigroot Creek, Dog Creek, etc. Later on some of them were renamed to their Maori equivalents, so now we have the Manuherikia River and the Taieri River, for instance.