Nausea

How to spell nausea

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce nausea

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nausea mean?

1. nounA feeling of sickness with an urge to vomit.

Nausea in a sentence

• The long boat trip left her with a wave of nausea.

• One side effect of the medication is mild nausea.

Where does nausea come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word travels straight back to the Greek noun nausia, which literally meant 'seasickness', built on naus, the Greek word for a ship. The ancient Greeks, like many seafaring peoples, knew the queasy misery of a rolling deck, so the feeling took its name from the vessel itself. Latin borrowed the term as nausea, still meaning the sickness of the sea, but gradually it widened to cover any feeling of being about to vomit, whatever the cause. English picked it up in the early 1500s, keeping the Latin spelling intact, which is exactly why the tricky vowel cluster '-ausea' survives unchanged. The same naus root surfaces in 'nautical' and 'astronaut', a reminder that the word is, at heart, about ships.

How the word is built

• naus- (from Greek naus: ship)
• -ea (noun suffix, via Latin nausea: seasickness)