Seaside

How to spell seaside

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce seaside

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does seaside mean?

1. nounThe land along the edge of the sea, especially as a place for holidays or recreation.

Seaside in a sentence

• The family booked a cottage at the seaside for the summer.

• Every August they drive to the seaside and walk along the promenade.

Where does seaside come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Seaside is a transparent compound of two very old native English words, both inherited from Germanic roots rather than borrowed from Latin or French. The first part, 'sea', descends from the Old English sǣ, which referred to any large body of water and shares ancestry with the Dutch zee and the German See. The second part, 'side', comes from the Old English sīde, originally meaning a flank or the long edge of something, the same word that gives us the side of a body or a building. Joined together, the compound names the land lying along the edge of the sea, and it became especially common from the 1700s onward as coastal resorts grew popular with holidaymakers. Because both elements are familiar everyday words, the only real spelling point to watch is that they fuse into one solid word with no space or hyphen.

How the word is built

• sea (Old English sǣ: the ocean)
• side (Old English sīde: a flank or edge)