seasonal

UK/ˈsiːzənəl/US/ˈsiːzənəl/

adjectiveB1+3 meanings Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,393 of 15,258mostly written

Seasonal means tied to one time of year and absent the rest of it. Strawberries in June, ice cream vans in August, the shop that opens for six weeks before Christmas and shuts again.

It goes with work as much as with food. Seasonal work is picking, packing, waiting tables in a resort — jobs that end when the season does. Weather reports use it for what is normal in that month: seasonal temperatures, a cold snap that is nothing more than seasonal. It also covers what belongs to a season in feeling, like seasonal decorations or seasonal greetings on a card. Keep it apart from seasoned, which is about salt and pepper or long experience, and from seasonable, a rarer word meaning suitable for the time of year.

Definitions of seasonal

1adjectiveseasonalHappening or available at one particular time of year only.B1+~71%
“Seasonal work on the farm ends in October.”
2adjectivenormalNormal or expected for that time of year.B1~2%
“Temperatures will stay close to the seasonal average.”
3adjectivebelongingBelonging to a particular season, especially Christmas.B1~27%
“The window was full of seasonal decorations.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 25 sentences found in the wild and placed 22 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Where it comes from

Proto-Indo-European
*seh₁- — to sow, plant
Latin
satiō — act of sowing, planting
Old French
seson — time of sowing, seeding
Middle English
sesoun — time of the year
English
season
English, today
seasonal

Built from

serō · Latin — to sow, plant

From season + -al. season comes from Middle English sesoun (“time of the year”), from Old French seson (“time of sowing, seeding”), from Latin satiō (“act of sowing, planting”) from satum, past participle of serō (“to sow, plant”) from Proto-Indo-European seh₁- (“to sow, plant”). Akin to Old English sāwan (“to sow”), sǣd (“seed”). a doublet of saison. Displaced native Middle English sele (“season”) (from Old English sǣl (“season, time, occasion”)), Middle English tide (“season, time of year”) (from Old English tīd (“time, period, yeartide, season”)).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Time & Calendar, Weather & Seasons

Practise this word

seasonal in the wild

Female seasonal breeders will have one or more estrus cycles only when she is "in season" or fertile and receptive to mating.
Seasonal breeder
Viernes grew up on a farm and did seasonal labor in agriculture and in canneries in Alaska.
Gene Viernes
Influenza A virus, or IAV, is a pathogen with strains that cause seasonal flu in humans; it can also infect birds and some mammals.
Influenza A virus
Symptoms of human seasonal flu usually include fever, cough, sore throat, muscle aches and, in severe cases, breathing problems and pneumonia that may be fatal.
Influenza A virus
Annually, about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness and 290,000 to 650,000 deaths from seasonal flu occur worldwide.
Flu season

1 / 5

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the serō family

season

seasonal — used about once every 3,411 pages · #8,393 · point at the bar for the others

seasonal menu

Definitions of seasonal

1adjectiveseasonalHappening or available at one particular time of year only.B1+~71%

“Seasonal work on the farm ends in October.”

2adjectivenormalNormal or expected for that time of year.B1~2%

“Temperatures will stay close to the seasonal average.”

3adjectivebelongingBelonging to a particular season, especially Christmas.B1~27%

“The window was full of seasonal decorations.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 25 sentences found in the wild and placed 22 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.