tide
/tʌɪd
/- But access to the port basin lay through channels where the tide fell 32 feet twice daily.
- Sibyl glanced back at the rising and falling tides of the English Channel, and sighed with the grace of a heavy heart.
- The highest high tides, called the semilunar tides, occur twice a month around the times of the full and new moon.
- The structure would be built over the water, allowing the tide to ebb and flow unhindered.
- He related his own experience of how people can get caught out, unaware of the danger because it is the area nearest the shore that gets covered by water first as the tide comes in.
- As the tide ebbs the sea water starts to drain from the river, making visible the runs and likely lies of fish just in from the Atlantic.
Synonyms
- It was another bizarre sight but even the half-time whistle, once it finally came, did little to stem the tide of extraordinary events.
- On both these occasions, though for very different reasons, the mourners and the mourned were swept together by a powerful tide of emotion.
- He's a little man swept up in the tide of big events.
Synonyms
Phrasal verbs
tide someone over
Derivatives
tideless
- Like everything else in the picture, the water on which the barge floats is serene and unruffled, as in a tideless sea or lagoon.
- In the Prime Minister's mental landscape Britain's economy is a tideless sea.
- Many seas are tideless, and the waters of some are saline only in a very slight degree.
Origin
Old English tīd 'time, period, era', of Germanic origin; related to Dutch tijd and German Zeit, also to time. The sense relating to the sea dates from late Middle English.
In Old English a tide was a period or season, a sense surviving in Eastertide and Shrovetide, and it was not used in connection with the sea until the later medieval period. The saying time and tide wait for no man originally referred just to time, with tide used as a repetition of the sense to add emphasis. Despite the great difference in their contemporary meanings, tidy (Middle English) is from tide. Right up to the early 18th century it meant ‘timely, seasonable, opportune’, and acquired its current sense via the uses ‘attractive, good-looking’ and ‘good, pleasing’ around 1700. Perhaps based on tidy is the verb titivate which in the early 19th century was also spelt tidivate.