Word.ws English Dictionary

East River

East River proper noun: a channel in New York City, New York Harbor, at the narrow end of Long Island Sound, separating Manhattan, from Long Island.

east river: a channel in New York City, New York Harbor, at the narrow end of Long Island Sound, separating...
Image: mksfly, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Proper noun

the East River

  1. A channel in New York City, New York Harbor, at the narrow end of Long Island Sound, separating Manhattan, from Long Island.
    • The East River moved over the bedrock riddled with the tunnels of deep underground trains and connected with the Hudson, flowing southeast past the Statue of Liberty, out of New York Harbor and out into the Atlantic.2010, Emily St. John Mandel, The Singer’s Gun, Picador (2015), page 223

Origin of East River

east + river * (New York City): From being a river-like channel lying east of Manhattan (“New York City”)

Questions about East River

What does East River mean?
East River means a channel in New York City, New York Harbor, at the narrow end of Long Island Sound, separating Manhattan, from Long Island.
What part of speech is East River?
East River is a proper noun.

Words near East River in the dictionary

  1. East Retford
  2. East Richmond Heights
  3. East Ridgley
  4. East Riding
  5. East Riding of Yorkshire
  6. East River
  7. East Rochester
  8. East Rockaway
  9. East Rockingham
  10. East Rudham
  11. East Runton

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: East River (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “East River.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/east_river. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.