Ocean

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈəʊ.ʃən/

Definitions

1. A vast body of saltwater that covers most of Earth's surface and is divided into several major regions
2. A large expanse of saltwater that occupies a significant portion of the planet and is typically categorized into several distinct areas
3. A deep and extensive area of saline water that constitutes a major part of terrestrial environments, classified into various sections

Etymology: The most surprising thing about "ocean" is that the Greeks did not originally use it for the sea at all. In Greek myth, Ōkeanos was a Titan and a water deity, imagined as a great river encircling the flat disc of the earth, and the "Ocean" was that encircling stream rather than the body of water we mean today. The name passed into Latin as "Ōceanus" and kept that mythic sense for a long time. Old French took the word as "occean", and English speakers borrowed it in the Middle English period. It was not native to English: it displaced the Old English word "gārseċġ", which survives only in poetry and in the sense of an ocean-sea, and which was lost from everyday use. In Latin the fuller phrase "mare ōceanum" ("ocean sea") was common, and French and English speakers likewise spoke of the "ocean sea", which is how the broad sense of the word came to dominate. The word is a doublet of "Oceanus", meaning the two forms come from the same source but entered the language by different routes, one as a learned mythological name and one as an everyday noun. Its sister forms in Dutch "oceaan", German "Ozean", French "océan" and Italian "oceano" show how widely the word spread across European languages.

Synonyms: sea, water, marine, deep, blue

Antonyms: land, earth, continent, ground, soil