Sea

How to spell sea

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sea

What does sea mean?

1. nounA large body of salt water that covers much of the earth or forms part of an ocean.

Sea in a sentence

• The fishing boats returned from the sea before the storm hit.

• Their holiday cottage looked out over a calm grey sea.

Where does sea come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native Germanic word, descending from the Old English sǣ, which meant a large body of salt water as well as a lake. It traces back to the Proto-Germanic saiwiz, the same ancestor that gave Dutch zee and German See, though the exact pre-Germanic root is genuinely unknown. From its earliest recorded use it has named the great expanses of salt water that surround the land, and the spelling settled into the modern 'sea' through Middle English. The simple 'ea' spelling is the trap here, since the word sounds identical to 'see' and to the letter 'C'; remembering that the related compounds 'seaside', 'seafood', and 'seashell' all keep that same 'ea' can anchor it. Its long maritime history also produced a host of everyday phrases, from 'at sea' to 'sea level'.

How the word is built

• sea (single root noun; from Old English sǣ, no affixes)

Words that sound like sea

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• see: To perceive something with the eyes, or to understand something mentally.