Village in Banda Aceh, Indonesia following the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed the lives of more than a quarter million people
1 April 2024
A tsunami is a series of large waves caused by an earthquake or other underwater disturbance. The phenomenon is also known by the technically inaccurate term tidal wave. Both terms have been in English use for over a century, with tidal wave being the older and until relatively recently the far more common of the two.
Tidal wave is an open compound noun formed within English, tidal + wave. Originally, the term had a very different meaning, referring to the bulge of water in the middle of the ocean caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. This sense of tidal wave dates to the early eighteenth century, when it appears in a 1715 treatise on the tides written by Edward Barlow, an English priest and inventor:
Notwithstanding the Co-extension of the Moon’s Pressure, to all that Tract of the Atlantick already described; so as to adjust the Primary Tide to itself, thro’out the said Extent of the Sea, to the same Instant, from the very nature of its Libration; yet as to that Part of the same Tidal Wave, which keeps closest to the Sea’s Central Meridian, where it rowls in deepest Water, and flows in the directest Channel, from the Tropick, its supposed Axe, towards the Pole; it must needs run higher than the rest of the Ocean.
Tidal wave could also be applied to the incoming water in a harbor at high tide, especially in a place where the tides were extreme. Because they resembled such an extreme tidal influx, by the mid nineteenth century tidal wave also came to applied to the waves generated by an earthquake, even though these waves are not tidal in nature. The earliest use in this sense that I have found (there are undoubtedly earlier examples out there), is from the Boston Courier of 6 May 1843, describing such a surge of water in Nova Scotia. From the description, it’s easy to see how such an earthquake-created surge could be mistaken for an extreme tidal surge:
A Tidal Wave. A singular phenomenon, which occasioned no little alarm, occurred at Yarmouth, N.S., on the 18th ult. The Herald, published at that place, says that at low water, a little before dusk, the tide suddenly rushed in, in the space of a few minutes to the height of five to seven feet, and immediately receded with equal rapidity, dragging some small craft from their moorings, and leaving the flats again bare. The whole took place in about twenty minutes. At Bunker’s Island and the Cove the water rose ten feet.
Tidal wave can also be used figuratively. Here is an example from the Bristol Mercury of 11 May 1839. The allusion here seems to be that of a tidal surge, rather than an earthquake-created one:
One thing has been proved, we think, sufficiently—that a government based on the doctrine of finality cannot stand: it was the rock on which the administration of Lord Melbourne has split. We are now about to try the interregnum of a Tory rule, that is less likely to withstand the shock of opinion, and the perpetual buffeting of the tidal wave of the movement still going on.
Tidal wave was far more common in non-scientific use than tsunami until the 1970s. Tsunami is a borrowing from Japanese, a compound formed in that language from tsu (harbor) + nami (waves). It first gained traction in the English-speaking scientific community in the early twentieth century because tidal wave is an inaccurate term when applied to earthquake-created surges.
The earliest use of tsunami in English that I know of is in Washington, DC’s Evening Star of 20 July 1896 in reference to the Sanriku earthquake of June 1896, magnitude 7.2. The earthquake created two tsunamis caused at least 22,000 deaths in Japan:
At about 8 o’clock the people living along the coast were startled from their tranquillity by a frightful roaring from the sea, likened to the reports of heavy artillery. Roused to action by cries of “tsunami,” tsunami,” [sic] (“tidal wave,” “tidal wave”) from those who realized the impending disaster, the inhabitants rushed from their homes into a night of pitchy blackness to be overtaken and engulfed in their flight to higher ground.
Early uses of tsunami in English were invariably in a Japanese context. The first use outside of that context that I know of appears in the journal Nature of 21 December 1929 in reference to a tsunami that struck the Maritime provinces of Canada:
The earthquake was obviously of the highest order of intensity at its centre, for it overthrew chimneys, and was therefore of the order of over No. 7 on the RossiForel scale in the towns of Nova Scotia, more than 400 miles from its origin, and it occasioned a tsunami or earthquake wave, which drowned 26 people on the Burin Peninsula in Newfoundland, did extensive damage to property, and in places swept inland to the height of 100 feet.
Like tidal wave, the noun tsunami can also be used figuratively to mean an overwhelming force. The first such use that I’m aware of occupies a transitional stage between literal and figurative. It is in the context of ocean pollution by undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau. From the San Francisco Chronicle of 3 April 1970:
Nowhere is this sense of urgency stronger than in America’s new ecological consciousness, Cousteau said.
“Perhaps a tsunami of salvation will come from America,” Cousteau said, using the technical term for a tidal wave. “It must come—for that’s what the oceans are all about: not for man to get richer, but for man to survive.”
And a figurative use of tsunami completely divorced from the context of the ocean appears two years later. From the journal Science of 11 August 1972:
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently swimming through a tsunami of comments generated by its announced intention to alter the regulations concerning the dispensation of methadone.
Today, tsunami has been completely anglicized and it has overwhelmed the older term tidal wave.
Sources:
Barlow, Edward. “The Second Treatise of the Tide.” In Meteorological Essays. London: John Hooke and Thomas Caldecott, 1715, 102. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“The Change in the Ministry.” Bristol Mercury (England), 11 May 1839, 3/1. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.
“Dark View of Ocean Pollution.” San Francisco Chronicle (California), 3 April 1970, 6/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Gregory, J.W. “The Earthquake South of Newfoundland and Submarine Canyons” (letter). Nature, 124, 21 December 1929, 945–46. DOI: 10.1038/124945a0.
Holden, Constance. “Methadone: New FDA Guidelines Would Tighten Distribution.” Science, 177.4048, 11 August 1972, 502/1.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2023, s.v. tidal wave, n.; second edition, 1989, tsunami, n.
“The Terrible Tidal Wave.” Evening Star (Washington, DC), 20 July 1896, 1/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“A Tidal Wave.” Boston Courier (Massachusetts), 6 May 1843, 2/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Photo credit: Philip A. McDanial, 2 January 2005, US Navy photo. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.