When the levee breaks, what about the dikes?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/05/2011 (5514 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For some reason, I got a little bit of Led Zeppelin in my head this morning. Of course, since we’re dealing with a flood, it was "When the Levee Breaks," and I wasn’t complaining a bit.

As a good French Immersion student, I of course knew that "levee" was a French word, though I guess it should be spelled "levée" with an accent. It’s a past tense of the verb "lever" which means "to raise." And so a levee is simply a nice French description for something that is raised — you know, like a dike.

So I got to wondering about the differences between a levee and a dike. How come the Zep didn’t do a song called "When the Dike Breaks"?

Of course, I Googled it. The first result was, as it often is, a Wikipedia article. I paraphrased a bit of the etymology of levee, above, from that article, though I swear I knew it already.

And, it turns out that a levee and a dike are simply two words for basically the same thing.

What I found more interesting was the etymology of the word "dike." Wikipedia says it’s most likely derived from the Dutch work "djik." The Dutch, of course, are famous for their dikes.

Even more interestingly, in the Anglo-Saxon version of the word, it was spelled "dic" but it was pronounced differently in different areas. In the north, it was pronounced with a hard c — so similarly to the modern word "dike."

But in the south, it was pronounced as you would pronounce "dicz."

In other words: "ditch."

And, in fact, Wikipedia says that "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."

So yes — here in Manitoba, if we want to dig a small channel for a stream, we would dig a ditch.

But in northern England, and in parts of the U.S., they would call that a dike. If it had a stream in it, they might call it a "running dike."

I don’t know what they would call a levee/dike in northern England. Maybe a floodbank or a stopbank, because it’s also a type of embankment.

Confusing? Sure — but also interesting as all heck.

Just remember this vocabulary lesson if people call you up, wondering why we’re digging dikes for the floods, and not building levees.

Oh, and remember that song I had in my head? Here’s the original version: "When the Levee Breaks," by Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie, recorded in 1929 and courtesy archive.org. It’s in reference to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

Stream it below: