Meaning: sea

Illustrative Context

Her house is beside the sea.

Target Sense

• The most generic noun for the sea, as a general environment, in contrast to land.
• The target sense is therefore the one particularly inherent in English usage the sea, not in the count noun sense of a particular, named sea seen as a geographical unit in contrast to other ‘seas’.
• To identify the basic, most generic lexeme in your language, follow only popular usage in this non-count sense. In particular, do not focus on technical definitions or criteria, e.g. of what is claimed to ‘count’ as a sea as opposed to a lake or ocean in geographical or cartographical analyses. Ignore these count noun senses anyway. Do not make judgements on the basis of the names of particular water bodies that may or may not be named as lake, sea or ocean (inconsistently) from one particular language to the next (e.g. the Baltic and Caspian ‘Seas’, but ‘Lakes’ Superior, Victoria or Baikal). This terminology is inconsistent, and not relevant to the IE-CoR target sense.
• The lexeme selected must be applicable to the prototypical case of sea that is of salt water, not landlocked, and in scale is unbounded from the perspective of an observer anywhere on land, i.e. sea that stretches at least to the horizon and whose other shore is so distant that it cannot be seen from any point on land. Necessarily, this is far greater than the prototypical scale of English lake and the corresponding IE-CoR meaning lake.
• On the other hand, avoid terms that bear the specific geographical, cartographical sense of ocean, i.e. the largest scale of one of the limited number of specific named oceans on Earth, accepted in geographical terminology. The term ocean in English, like its equivalents in many other languages, represents a hypernym beyond the IE-CoR target sense of sea. Do not enter terms for (or equivalent to) ocean.
• Compare with the approaches to considerations of size also in the separate IE-CoR meanings river, mountain and forest.)
• Enter only the default, neutral-register term. Avoid all other, marked registers, such as literary, poetic or antiquated terms like main, (the) deep, French (le) large.
• The target sense is literal, the sea as the natural environment. Avoid terms specific to extensions and figurative senses of the sea as vastness, wilderness, menace, oblivion, ‘highway’, etc. (e.g. a sea of troubles, tears, etc.).