Rheic

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Describing the ancient Rheic Ocean, a body of water that once lay between the supercontinents Gondwana and Laurussia
2. Relating to a vanished Paleozoic ocean that separated the landmasses which later formed parts of Europe and North America
3. Of or belonging to a long-lost sea that existed hundreds of millions of years ago between ancient continental plates

Etymology: The Rheic Ocean is a name for a vanished sea, not a word anyone uses in everyday speech. It was proposed by geologists for an ocean that once lay between the ancient continents that later merged into Pangaea, and it takes its name from Rhea, a Titan in Greek mythology. The name was chosen because Rhea was a sister of Iapetus, the Titan after whom the older predecessor of the Atlantic Ocean had been named, and that ocean, in turn, was named for Iapetus being the father of Atlas, the figure from whom the Atlantic's modern eponym comes. The word is therefore a family-tree joke of sorts: a mythological sibling placed beside an earlier mythological name, forming a set of ocean names drawn from the Titans. The "-ic" ending is the ordinary adjectival suffix used for naming features of this kind, which turns the Titan's name into a label for a body of water.