3 Answers

1 a natural stream of water of fairly large size flowing in a definite course or channel or series of diverging and converging channels.
2.
a similar stream of something other than water: a river of lava; a river of ice.
3.
any abundant stream or copious flow; outpouring: rivers of tears; rivers of words.
4.
( initial capital letter ) Astronomy . the constellation Eridanus.
5.
Printing . a vertical channel of white space resulting from the alignment in several lines of spaces between words.
Idioms
6.
sell down the river, to betray; desert; mislead: to sell one's friends down the river.
7.
up the river, Slang .
a.
to prison: to be sent up the river for a bank robbery.
b.
in prison: Thirty years up the river had made him a stranger to society.

As Joni Mitchell sings, it  is something "I wish I could skate away on."

I can sing that backward, forward, and upside down.

River

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For other uses, see River (disambiguation).

A river is a natural watercourse,[1] usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, a lake, a sea, or another river. In a few cases, a river simply flows into the ground or dries up completely before reaching another body of water. Small rivers may also be called by several other names, including stream, creek, brook, rivulet, tributary and rill. There are no official definitions for generic terms, such as river, as applied to geographic features,[2] although in some countries or communities a stream may be defined by its size. Many names for small rivers are specific to geographic location; one example is "burn" in Scotland and northeast England. Sometimes a river is said to be larger than a creek,[3] but this is not always the case, because of vagueness in the language.[4]

Rivers are part of the hydrological cycle. Water within a river is generally collected from precipitation through a drainage basin from surface runoff and other sources such as groundwater recharge, springs, and the release of stored water in natural ice and snowpacks (e.g., from glaciers). Potamology is the scientific study of river.