sea change
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day
Merriam-Webster
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🗓️ 5 June 2025
⏱️ 2 minutes
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Summary
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 5, 2025 is:
sea change • \SEE-CHAYNJ\ • noun
Sea change refers to a big and sudden change or transformation.
// The early 2000s witnessed a sea change in public opinion about smoking in public places.
Examples:
“Over the course of my grandmother’s lifetime, gender expectations for women underwent a sea change. My grandmother ended up pursuing an education and becoming a doctor, leading an independent life that made her mother proud.” — Wendy Chen, LitHub.com, 20 May 2024
Did you know?
In The Tempest, William Shakespeare’s final play, sea change refers to a change brought about by the sea: the sprite Ariel, who aims to make Ferdinand believe that his father the king has perished in a shipwreck, sings within earshot of the prince, “Full fathom five thy father lies...; / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / into something rich and strange.” This is the original, now-archaic meaning of sea change. Today the term is used for a distinctive change or transformation. Long after sea change gained this figurative meaning, however, writers continued to allude to Shakespeare’s literal one; Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, and P.G. Wodehouse all used the term as an object of the verb suffer, but now a sea change is just as likely to be undergone or experienced.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's the Word of the Day podcast for June 5th. |
| 0:12.0 | Today's word is C-Change, spelled as two words, S-E-A-C-H-A-C-H-A-N-G-E. |
| 0:19.0 | C-Change is a noun. It refers to a big and sudden change or transformation. |
| 0:24.0 | Here's the word used in a sentence from lithub.com by Wendy Chen. |
| 0:28.5 | Over the course of my grandmother's lifetime, gender expectations for women underwent a sea change. |
| 0:34.6 | My grandmother ended up pursuing an education and becoming a doctor, leading an |
| 0:39.2 | independent life that made her mother proud. In The Tempest, Shakespeare's final play, the term |
| 0:45.9 | sea change refers to a change brought about by the sea. The sprite Ariel, who aims to make |
| 0:52.3 | Ferdinand believe that his father, the king, has perished in a shipwreck, sings within earshot of the prince, |
| 0:59.1 | Full fathom five, thy father lies, nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange. |
| 1:08.1 | This is the original, now archaic meaning of sea change. Today the term is used for a |
| 1:14.2 | distinctive change or transformation. Long after sea change gained this figurative meaning, however, |
| 1:20.3 | writers continued to allude to Shakespeare's literal one. Dickens, Thoreau, and Woodhouse |
| 1:26.4 | all use the term as an object of the verb |
| 1:29.3 | suffer, but now a sea change is just as likely to be undergone or experienced. With your |
| 1:35.3 | word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski. Visit Miriamwebster.com today for definitions, wordplay, and trending word lookups. |
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