bayou

1. A body of water, such as a creek or small river, that is a tributary of a larger body of water.
2. A sluggish stream that meanders through lowlands, marshes, or plantation grounds.

[Louisiana French bayouque, bayou, possibly from Choctaw bayuk.]

For more information on bayou, visit Britannica.com.

After visiting the city of Levees (1766), Captain Harry Gordon wrote, "We left New Orleans...and lay that night at the Bayoue." Bayou was the second of two Louisiana French words in his journal that were to become part of the American English vocabulary, just as Louisiana itself would become part of the United States in 1803.

Unlike levee, however, bayou is not originally a French word. We owe it to the Choctaw Indians, who showed the French around when they began to arrive in what they called Louisiana early in the eighteenth century. The French were familiar with the Mississippi River, of course, but not with the sluggish little streams flowing into it in the flatlands near the Gulf of Mexico. This, said the Choctaw, is a bayuk. Bien entendu, said the French, bayou.

In American English, it took some experiments in spelling before we settled on bayou. We also wrote bayoo, byo, and bayyou in attempts to reflect the pronunciation.

To this day in Louisiana, bayou retains its original meaning of "a small slow stream." In other parts of the United States, the word has been adapted to the terrain. In the West, a bayou can be simply a ravine or dry streambed. In the North and West, a bayou can be a small lake or lagoon, especially one next to a river or lake.

Bayou, a term used throughout the South, may refer to bays, creeks, sloughs, or irrigation canals for rice fields. However, in the Mississippi River Delta region of Louisiana and Mississippi, it chiefly refers to the sluggish offshoots of rivers that meander through marshes and alluvial lowlands in the flat delta. During floods, the river may break through its curving banks to forge a more direct channel. The old channel, having lost the principal flow, becomes a sluggish stretch of brown water called a bayou. Some larger examples, such as Bayou Lafourche, are remnants of belts the Mississippi once followed to the Gulf of Mexico. Five times in the last five thousand years, the Mississippi has shifted to an entirely new course. In 1963 the Army Corps of Engineers installed a dam to try to prevent the Mississippi from diverting into the Atchafalaya

River, a diversion that could leave New Orleans on a bayou.

The term "bayou" most likely came from the Choctaw bayuk ("small sluggish stream"), although some sources insist it is derived from the French boyau ("gut" or "channel"). When boats were virtually the only means of transportation in the delta region, much human activity focused on bayous. Legendary pirate Jean Laffite used Bayou Barataria in southeastern Louisiana as his headquarters in the early 1800s. Bayou Pierre, southwest of Jackson, Mississippi, was an obstacle well known to travelers on the Natchez Trace. Antebellum planters romanticized the bayous' beauty, building colonnaded mansions among moss-draped live oaks on the shores. During the Civil War, Confederates used bayous flowing into the Gulf to run weapons, medical supplies, and other contraband past the Union blockade. Today bayous are used for flood control, fishing, and even recreation. Louisiana has incorporated several bayous into its state parks.

Bibliography

Balée, William, ed. Advances in Historical Ecology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Kane, Harnett T. The Bayous of Louisiana. New York: Morrow, 1943.

McPhee, John. The Control of Nature. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989.

—Robert W. Twyman/W. P.

Term used mainly in Louisiana and Mississippi to describe a swampy, slowly moving or stationary body of water that was once part of a lake, river, or gulf.

This article is about a water landform. For other uses, see Bayou (disambiguation).

Big Cypress Bayou in Jefferson, Texas off U.S. Route 59.

A bayou at the Sabine River at the Louisiana rest stop.

A bayou (pronounced /ˈbaɪ.oʊ/ or /ˈbaɪjuː/) is a body of water typically found in flat, low-lying areas, and can either refer to an extremely slow-moving stream or river (often with a poorly defined shoreline), or to a marshy lake or wetland. Bayous are commonly found in the Gulf Coast region of the southern United States, particularly the Mississippi River region, with the state of Louisiana being famous for them. A bayou is frequently an anabranch or minor braid of a braided channel that is moving much more slowly than the mainstem, often becoming boggy and stagnant, though the vegetation varies by region. Many bayous are home to crawfish, certain species of shrimp, other shellfish, catfish, alligators, and myriad other species.

The word was first used by the English in Louisiana and is thought to originate from the Choctaw word bayuk, which means "small stream."^{[citation needed]} Another theory on the origin of bayou is from the French words bas lieu (pronounced phonetically as ba-li-you) meaning "low place".^{[citation needed]} The first settlements of Acadians in southern Louisiana were near Bayou Lafourche and Bayou des Ecores, which led to a close association of the bayou with Cajun culture.

Bayou Country is most closely associated with Cajun and Creole cultural groups native to the Gulf Coast region generally stretching from Houston, Texas, to Mobile, Alabama, with its center in New Orleans, Louisiana.

An alternate spelling "buyou" has also been used, as in the "Pine Buyou" used in a description by Congress in 1833 of Arkansas Territory.

Contents 1 In Fiction 1.1 Films 1.2 Video Games 1.3 Literature 1.4 Television 1.5 Music 2 See also 3 Notable bayous

In Fiction

Bayous are often the setting of horror stories as they are popularly perceived as eerie and mysterious.

Films

• Southern Comfort
• Eve's Bayou
• The Skeleton Key
• Hatchet
• The Reaping
• Swamp Thing
• The Rescuers (animated)
• The Haunted Mansion
• Schultze Gets the Blues

Video Games

• Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest
• Rayman 2: The Great Escape
• The House of the Dead: Overkill
• Left 4 Dead 2

Literature

Bayou Navigation in Dixie, 1863

• the novels of Anne Rice
• The Southern Vampire Mysteries
• V.C. Andrews "Landry" series, most notably Tarnished Gold and Ruby
• The Immortals After Dark series by Kresley Cole
• Midnight Bayou by Nora Roberts

Television

• True Blood
• Viva La Bam - Episode 29

Music

• Bayou Country (album)--Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Blue Bayou--Roy Orbison
• Jambalaya (On the Bayou)
• Louisiana Bayou—Dave Matthews Band
• Born on the Bayou - Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Evangeline—The Icicle Works (mentioned in lyrics)
• Devils Queen - Black Stone Cherry (mentioned in lyrics)
• Amos Moses - Jerry Reed
• Deadly Avenger - The Bayou
• Blues On The Bayou - B.B. King Album
• The Adventures of Bayou Billy - The Unicorns
• Mississippi Mud - Hank Williams III
• Fire on the Bayou - The Meters

See also

• Wetland
• Slough
• Swamp
• Hurricane on the Bayou
• New Orleans
• Louisiana
• Bayou City (a nickname for Houston)

Notable bayous

• Bayou Bartholomew
• Bayou Lafourche
• Cypress Bayou
• Bayou St. John
• Big Bayou Canot
• Buffalo Bayou

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - sumpet flodløb

Nederlands (Dutch)
moerassige inham (Zuiden van V.S.)

Français (French)
n. - (US) bayou, marécages

Deutsch (German)
n. - Altwasser, sumpfiger Nebenarm

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - βάλτος, έλος

Italiano (Italian)
ramo paludoso di fiume

Português (Portuguese)
n. - igarapé (m), baía (f) pantanosa

Русский (Russian)
болотистая заводь

Español (Spanish)
n. - brazo pantanoso de un río

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - sumpigt utlopp

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
海湾, 河口, 支流

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 海灣, 河口, 支流

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 호수의 출구

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 緩流河川

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) جزء هادىء من نهر‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮זרוע נהר בוצית‬

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