Dike

For other uses of dike or dyke (and combining forms) see Dyke.

Info board about one of three pumps along the dike next to the ringvaart.

View of the Ringvaart looking north towards the location of the info board.

View of the info board (left) and the mill itself, looking north towards fort Vijfhuizen.

A dike (or dyke) is an artificial earthen wall, constructed as a defense or as a boundary. It is also known in American English as a levee, from the French word levée (elevated). The best known form of dike is a construction built along the edge of a body of water, to prevent it from flooding onto an adjacent lowland. Dikes can be mainly found along the sea, where dunes are not strong enough, along rivers for protection against high-floods, along lakes or along polders. Furthermore, dikes have been built for the purpose of empoldering, or as a boundary for an inundation area. The latter can be a controlled inundation by the military or a measure to prevent inundation of a larger area surrounded by dikes. Dikes have also been built as field boundaries and as military defences. More on this type of dike can be found in the article on dry-stone walls.

Dikes can be permanent earthworks or emergency constructions (often of sandbags) built hastily in a flood emergency. When such an emergency bank is added on top of an existing dike it is known as a cradge.

In the Midwest there is no such thing as a "dike", they are all called levees. If you say the word dike in the midwest everyone would just start laughing.

Dikes were first constructed in the Indus Valley Civilization (in Pakistan and North India from circa 2600 BC) on which the agrarian life of the Harappan peoples depended. ^[1]

The modern word dike is most probably derived from the Netherlands "dijk", where the construction of dikes is well attested since the 12th century. The Roman chronicler Tacitus however mentions the fact that the rebellious Batavi pierced dikes to flood their land and to protect their retreat (AD 70). The Dutch word dijk meant originally both the trench or the bank. The word is closely related to the English verb to dig (EWN).

In Anglo-Saxon, the word dic already existed and was pronounced with a hard c in northern England and as ditch in the south. Similar to Dutch, the English origins of the word lie in digging a trench and forming the upcast soil into a bank alongside it. This practice has meant that the name may be given to either the excavation or the bank. Thus Offa's Dyke is a combined structure and Car Dyke is a trench though it once had raised banks as well. In the midlands and north of England, a dike is what a ditch is in the south, a property boundary marker or small drainage channel. Where it carries a stream, it may be called a running dike as in Rippingale Running Dike, which leads water from the catchwater drain, Car Dyke, to the South Forty Foot Drain in Lincolnshire (TF1427). The Weir Dike is a soak dike in Bourne North Fen, near Twenty and alongside the River Glen.

Dikes are very common on the flatlands bordering the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Canada. The Acadians who settled the area can be credited with construction of most of the dikes in the area, created for the purpose of farming the fertile tidal flatlands. These dikes are referred to as "aboiteau".

A dike made from stones laid in horizontal rows with a bed of thin turf between each of them is known as a spetchel.

Dike can also mean a pond in the same way as Australians use the word dam. However, this is more likely in the several other languages which use obviously related words. Frisian is one of them. The Frisians who settled in England with the Angles and Saxons form a linguistic link with Dutch dating from well before the 12th century. See the stories of Saints Boniface and Wulfram.

In April 2006, South Korea completed the Saemangeum Seawall, displacing the Afsluitdijk as the longest man-made dike in the world.

External links and references

• Levees.Org (non-profit based in New Orleans)
• Richmond's Dyke system
• DeltaWorks.Org Flood protecting dams, dikes and barriers project in the Netherlands
• Dictionary of Archaic and obsolete phrases

1. ^ http://history-world.org/indus_valley.htm The Indus Valley. Accessed June 11, 2006

References

• Ordnance Survey Pathfinder 856 (1:25 000 Sheet TF12)
• Oxford English Dictionary ISBN 0-19-861212-5

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

• EWN : Etymologisch Woordenboek v/h Nederlands 2004

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