Other forms: tides
The tide is the sea rising and falling twice a day, pulled by the moon. Boats sitting on mud at low tide, a sandcastle gone by evening, the wet line of seaweed showing how far the water came up.
High tide and low tide are the two ends of it, and the sea is said to come in and go out. The word stretches to cover anything moving in one great direction: a tide of refugees, the tide of public opinion, a rising tide of complaints. When the tide turns, the advantage moves to the other side, and turning the tide is what a team does after going two goals down. A phrasal verb hides in here as well, since something that tides you over gets you through until the next lot arrives, like a sandwich tiding you over until dinner. The old saying that time and tide wait for no man keeps a much older meaning of the word alive.
1nountideThe regular rise and fall of the sea, caused by the pull of the moon.~73%
“We walked out to the island at low tide and hurried back.”
2nounlargeA large movement of people, feeling or events in one direction.~27%
“A tide of cheap imports closed the last local factory.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
tide is a movement of the sea.
Tide is related to time, and the connection still shows in its Germanic relatives, where Dutch tijd simply means time. The older sense was a period or a season, and because the sea keeps its times so faithfully, the word settled onto the water. The proverb about time and tide is really saying the same thing twice.
Middle English
tyde
English, today
tide
From Middle English tyde. Related to time. Cognate with Dutch tijd (“time”), {{cog|de|
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA