The Collaborative International Dictionary
Billabong \Bil"la*bong`\, n. [Native name.] In Australia, a blind channel leading out from a river; -- sometimes called an anabranch. This is the sense of the word as used in the Public Works Department; but the term has also been locally applied to mere back-waters forming stagnant pools and to certain water channels arising from a source.
Wiktionary
n. (context hydrology of a water channel English) A diverging branch of a river, creek, or stream which re-enters the main stream.
Wikipedia
An anabranch is a section of a river or stream that diverts from the main channel or stem of the watercourse and rejoins the main stem downstream. Local anabranches can be the result of small islands in the watercourse. In larger anabranches, the flow can diverge for a distance of several kilometers before rejoining the main channel.
Usage examples of "anabranch".
Ivanhoe and took no precautions when he saw the anabranch filling up before his eyes.
And in the afternoon we went for a row on the river, pulling easily up the anabranch and floating down with the stream under the shade of the river timber--instead of going to sleep and waking up helpless and soaked in perspiration, to find the women with headaches, as many do on Christmas Day in Australia.
The main current now runs straight, the anabranch diverges and then rejoins.
Sometimes used for an anabranch, but more often used for one that, in dry season or droughts especially, is cut off at either or both ends from the main stream.
Nilus mysteriously rose, broke its banks and spread a coat of thick, black mud replete with nutrition over the fields of that strange kingdom, seven hundred miles long but only four or five miles wide except for the anabranch valley of Ta-she and Lake Moeris, and the Delta.
So they quit the fields and moved into the villages of Upper Egypt between Nubia and the beginning of the anabranch that enclosed the land of Ta-she.
Every year at the beginning of summer, Nilus mysteriously rose, broke its banks and spread a coat of thick, black mud replete with nutrition over the fields of that strange kingdom, seven hundred miles long but only four or five miles wide except for the anabranch valley of Ta-she and Lake Moeris, and the Delta.