Seal

How to spell seal

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce seal

What does seal mean?

1. verbTo close something so firmly that air, water, or access cannot get through.
2. nounA sleek marine mammal with flippers that lives in cold coastal waters.
3. nounA device, ring, or mark that closes something or proves it has not been tampered with.

Seal in a sentence

• verb

  She used tape to seal the cardboard box before posting it.

• noun

  A grey seal basked on the rocks below the cliff.

• noun

  The rubber seal around the fridge door had perished and let warm air in.

• verb

  Fresh paint will seal the bare wood against damp.

• noun

  The wildlife guide pointed to a seal swimming near the harbour wall.

• noun

  The courier checked that the security seal on the parcel was intact.

Where does seal come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word seal actually carries two separate stories that happen to be spelled the same. The marine mammal sense descends from Old English seolh, a native Germanic word for the seal, with relatives across the old North Sea languages, and over the centuries it simply smoothed down to the modern one-syllable form. The fastening and stamping sense comes instead from Latin sigillum, meaning 'a little figure' or 'small mark', a diminutive of signum 'a sign or mark'; it travelled into English through Old French seel during the 1200s, when an impressed wax emblem authenticated documents. From that physical stamp grew the idea of closing something so tightly that it cannot be opened without breaking the mark, which is why we now seal envelopes, jars, and deals. The same signum root sits inside everyday words such as 'sign' and 'signal', a useful reminder of why the closing sense exists at all. Because the spelling collapsed two unrelated origins into one neat form, modern English treats seal as a single tidy word with several meanings.

How the word is built

• seal (single root; the animal from Old English seolh, the fastening sense from Latin sigillum 'small mark')