• WordNet 3.6
    • v tide be carried with the tide
    • v tide cause to float with the tide
    • v tide rise or move forward "surging waves"
    • n tide the periodic rise and fall of the sea level under the gravitational pull of the moon
    • n tide something that may increase or decrease (like the tides of the sea) "a rising tide of popular interest"
    • n tide there are usually two high and two low tides each day
    • ***

Additional illustrations & photos:

Time and tide wait for no man Time and tide wait for no man
Twas noon-tide on a summer day, and in a hammock bruin lay Twas noon-tide on a summer day, and in a hammock bruin lay
Stranded! After Storm has Ceased and Tide has Ebbed Stranded! After Storm has Ceased and Tide has Ebbed

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
  • Interesting fact: The laundry detergent Tide, has a market share of about forty percent market
    • Tide A stream; current; flood; as, a tide of blood. "Let in the tide of knaves once more; my cook and I'll provide."
    • Tide Tendency or direction of causes, influences, or events; course; current. "There is a tide in the affairs of men,
    • Tide The alternate rising and falling of the waters of the ocean, and of bays, rivers, etc., connected therewith. The tide ebbs and flows twice in each lunar day, or the space of a little more than twenty-four hours. It is occasioned by the attraction of the sun and moon (the influence of the latter being three times that of the former), acting unequally on the waters in different parts of the earth, thus disturbing their equilibrium. A high tide upon one side of the earth is accompanied by a high tide upon the opposite side. Hence, when the sun and moon are in conjunction or opposition, as at new moon and full moon, their action is such as to produce a greater than the usual tide, called the spring tide, as represented in the cut. When the moon is in the first or third quarter, the sun's attraction in part counteracts the effect of the moon's attraction, thus producing under the moon a smaller tide than usual, called the neap tide.
    • Tide (Mining) The period of twelve hours.
    • Tide Time; period; season. "This lusty summer's tide .""And rest their weary limbs a tide .""Which, at the appointed tide ,
      Each one did make his bride."
      "At the tide of Christ his birth."
    • Tide To betide; to happen. "What should us tide of this new law?"
    • v. t Tide tīd To cause to float with the tide; to drive or carry with the tide or stream. "They are tided down the stream."
    • Tide To pour a tide or flood.
    • Tide (Naut) To work into or out of a river or harbor by drifting with the tide and anchoring when it becomes adverse.
    • Tide Violent confluence.
    • ***
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
    • n tide In forestry, a freshet. In the Appalachian region logs are rolled into a stream and a ‘tide’ is awaited to carry them to the boom.
    • n tide Time; season.
    • n tide Fit time or season; opportunity.
    • n tide Eccles., a season of the church year; in a narrower sense, a feast-day; a festival: as, Whitsuntide (the whole octave or the day only); Hallowtide.
    • n tide Mass; office; service.
    • n tide A definite period of time; specifically, a day or an hour; in mining, the period of twelve hours.
    • n tide The periodical rise and fall of the waters of the ocean and its arms, due to the attraction of the moon and sun. Every particle of matter composing the earth gravitates toward the moon inversely as the square of its distance, this attraction being about of the weight of the particle. Living upon the earth, we consider bodies at rest which have a fixed position relative to the earth. Supposing, then, what cannot be strictly true, that the crust of the earth experiences no periodical deformation of the nature of a tide, the rise and fall of the water as compared with a bench-mark on the shore will be its rise and fall relatively to the earth's center. Since an attraction is simply a component acceleration, or rate of change of velocity, which compounded with others gives the resultant acceleration of the body's motion, it follows that the gravitational acceleration of the solid earth toward the moon, when all its particles are held rigidly together by cohesional accelerations, must be very nearly the same as the simple gravitation toward the moon of the particle at the earth's center. Now, we find the acceleration of a particle relative to the earth's center by geometrically subtracting from its absolute acceleration that of the center of the earth. Every particle of those parts of the surface nearest the moon is by the law of inverse squares more attracted to the moon than Is the center of the earth, and consequently is accelerated upward from the earth; and, in like manner, every particle of those parts furthest from the moon is less attracted to the moon than is the earth's center, and so is also accelerated upward from the earth (this causing the tide to rise in those parts). Thus, if m is the moon's attraction at the unit of distance, r the distance of the moon from the center of the earth, and a the earth's semidiameter, the attraction relative to the earth's center, at a point of the surface where the moon is in the zenith, is
    • n tide and the same where the moon is in the nadir is
    • n tide But where the particle as seen from the center of the earth is 90° from the moon, the attraction is a little less than the attraction at the center, being m/(r+ a) in place of m/r, and is also not parallel to the latter; so that it is accelerated downward toward the earth by an amount equal to Compounding these accelerations with the accelerations of the weights of the particles, we see that the resultant for any particle points less toward the moon than the line from the particle to the earth's center. But the surface of the water must be perpendicular to the resultant attraction; hence that surface must bulge out in a prolate form on the line through the centers of the moon and earth. The extreme difference in depth of the water would be about 20 inches, or, substituting the sun for the moon, it would be about 9 inches. If after the prolate form had been produced the disturbing body were to be suddenly annihilated, the ocean, supposing it covered the whole earth, would be thrown into a state of oscillation between a prolate and an oblate form. The time of the oscillations would depend on the depth of the water, and they would gradually die out from viscosity and other resistances. If the moon were to move round the water-covered earth on the equator, similar free oscillations would be set up and would gradually die out, but at the same time other motions would be forced and would not die out. Supposing first, for the sake of simplicity, that the effects of viscosity were very great, the water would be permanently raised all round the equator so as to increase the ellipticity of the surface of the sea, and such an effect, on a minute scale, is in fact produced. But, besides that, the equatorial section of the form of the water would be elliptical, the water continuing to pile up as long as it was at all drawn toward the moon; so that high tide would not be reached until 4 hours 45 minutes after the moon had crossed the meridian. If the resistance is not so great the time of high tide will be earlier or later, according as the natural oscillations are quicker or slower than the forced motion. The resistance will also produce small component oscillations of periods one half and one third of those of the principal oscillations. Every inequality in the motion of the sun and moon produces its own distinct component tide; but the magnitudes of the tides are very different from the magnitudes of the inequalities. The forms of the continents and of the sea-bottom affect the range of the tides in two ways. In the first, place, they form basins in which the waters are susceptible of free stationary oscillations of various periods. Now, it is a known theorem of dynamics that forced vibrations attain large amplitudes when their periods are nearly the same as those of free vibrations, but are very small when their periods are nearly double those of free vibrations. In the second place, the continents in many cases force the ocean into canals, in which the tides take the form of progressive waves of translation, which will be greatly increased by a narrowing and still more by a shoaling of the channel in the direction of their progression. In this case there are distinct cotidal lines. In the North Atlantic the semidiurnal tide is large, but much larger in the eastern and northern parts than on the southern and western sides. The diurnal tides, on the other hand, are remarkably small. High tide occurs in the northern parts three or four hours earlier than in the southern; and between them, about Nantucket, there is little tide, and in many places four tides a day. In the Gulf of Mexico the semidiurnal tides are very small, and the diurnal tides are alone sensible. In a few places, as Tahiti, in the Pacific, and Courtown, in county Wexford, Ireland, the lunar tides almost disappear, so that high tide never occurs many hours from noon or midnight, and near such places there are others where the tides almost altogether vanish.
    • n tide Ebb and flow; rise and fall; flux and reflux.
    • n tide Flow; current; stream; flood; torrent.
    • tide To happen; betide.
    • tide To drift with the tide; specifically (nautical), to work in or out of a harbor, etc., by taking advantage of the tide and anchoring when it becomes adverse.
    • tide To drive with the tide or current.
    • tide To carry through; manage.
    • tide To succeed in surmounting: with over: as, to tide over a difficulty.
    • tide An obsolete preterit of tie.
    • tide An erroneous Middle English form of tidy.
    • ***
Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary
  • Interesting fact: Reversing Falls is in Canada, where the St. John River flows into the Bay of Fundy at St. John, New Brunswick. The rapids at this juncture flows normally at low tide, backwards at high tide. Between tides there is a 15-minute period in which the river is placid and boaters sail by very quickly.
    • n Tide tīd time: season: the regular flux and reflux or rhythmic ebb and flow of the sea: course: a tide, time, or season, a feast-day, festival, a certain time, a day of twelve hours: commotion: turning-point
    • v.t Tide to drive with the stream
    • v.i Tide to pour a tide or flood: to work in or out of a river or harbour with the tide
    • ***


  • Thomas J. Watson
  • Richard E. Byrd
    Richard E. Byrd
    “Give wind and tide a chance to change.”
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
    “The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.”
  • Alice Meynell
    Alice Meynell
  • Edward Fairfax
    Edward Fairfax
    “Each mind is pressed, and open every ear, to hear new tidings, though they no way joy us.”
  • David Hare
    “Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.”


Ride with the tide - If you ride with the tide, you accept the majority decision.
Stem the tide - If people try to stem the tide, they are trying to stop something unpleasant from getting worse, usually when they don't succeed.
Swim against the tide - If you swim against the tide, you try to do something that is very difficult because there is a lot of opposition to you. ('Go against the tide' is an alternative form.)
Swim with the tide - If you swim with the tide, you do the same as people around you and accept the general consensus. ('Go with the tide' is an alternative form.)
Time and tide wait for no man - This is used as a way of suggestion that people should act without delay.


Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
AS. tīd, time; akin to OS. & OFries. tīd, D. tijd, G. zeit, OHG. zīt, Icel. , Sw. & Dan. tid, and probably to Skr. aditi, unlimited, endless, where a-, is a negative prefix. √58. Cf. Tidings Tidy Till (prep.) Time


In literature:

There is a boat-house, and a strip of gravelly beach, now that the tide is out.
"Floyd Grandon's Honor" by Amanda Minnie Douglas
But to paddle back against the swift-rolling tide would try the muscles of the hardiest men.
"The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hundred Years Ago" by John S. C. Abbott
The sand-banks there were too high to be ever overflowed by the tides, and were very dry, even to the depth of many feet.
"Cricket at the Seashore" by Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
The action of those three Legislatures marked the height of the early anti-slavery tide, and prompted a hope which was never fulfilled.
"The Negro and the Nation" by George S. Merriam
I frequently receive tidings from him, and sometimes two letters a day.
The tide was flowing, so they made rapid progress.
"The Three Commanders" by W.H.G. Kingston
"Up the River" by Oliver Optic
None of them New York spiffer captains could find Saturday Cove through the feather-tide that's outside just now.
"Blow The Man Down" by Holman Day
When he crossed from the north to the south hump, he noticed the incoming tide was nearly across the roadway, but thought little of it.
"Golden Days for Boys and Girls" by Various
But years went on and there were no tidings of King Olaf Tryggveson.
"Famous Sea Fights" by John Richard Hale

In poetry:

New every year,
New-born and newly dear,
He comes with tidings and a song,
The ages long, the ages long.
"Unto Us A Son Is Given" by Alice Meynell
And daily came the tidings
Of folly and crime and woe,
And one by one kept dying
The friends of long ago.
"The Postern Gate" by John Lawson Stoddard
I had a friend who went away
Over the distant sea,
But hill and tide can never hide
His gentle face from me.
"Distances" by Charles Hanson Towne
Peace! for that joy abiding
Whereon thou layest hold
Earth keepeth for a tiding
For the day when this is old.
"Earth The Healer, Earth The Keeper" by William Morris
His dreadful balances are made
To move with moon and tide;
Yet shall not mercy be afraid
Nor justice be denied.
"Compensations" by Alfred Noyes
But from the West has come no word,
And on the Hither Shore
No tidings Elven-folk have heard
Of Amroth evermore.
"Nimrodel" by J R R Tolkien

In news:

This group, which included the young juvenile seen on the right side of the picture, worked back and forth along a tide line.
Red Tide Blamed for Fish Kill at Texas Beaches.
Tides receiver Sterling Brown is brought down after a short gain by Seahawks' Kyle Self.
"It's the West, it's all our hopes and dreams, and also, it's Auburn," the Crimson Tide center said after Saturday's early game.
Touchdown, Honaker Tigers Honaker Tiger Ty Hall (9) scores in the Tigers playoff game against the Galax Maroon Tide, Saturday afternoon in Honaker.
Gargantuan Tide leaves Hogs nowhere to hide.
A new history shows how the British almost turned the tide in the Civil War.
In 1911, the tide finally turns.
AP Top 25 voter Joe Giglio moves up the Crimson Tide, which looked dominant in its 41-14 victory over Michigan.
Florida Grand Opera , Rising Tide, St Martha Concerts, and Tobacco Road's 100th anniversary.
Even if slow moving tides at times made for subpar fishing, no one could argue it was a great week on the water.
Here's some potentially rough news for Indiana in a season full of bad tidings.
Here's a little something to tide you over 'til then: A clip from the upcoming movie that premiered during the MTV Movie Awards last weekend.
Before entering this phase of the project, CHK America designed and fabricated customer information panels and purpose-built hardware for "The Tide," HRT's new rail line.
High Tide Tobacco & Gifts.

In science:

For example, the orbital dynamics in a binary system is very sensitive to the transfer of angular momentum, both via tides and transferred mass.
Compact binary mergers: an astrophysical perspective
The reader is referred to Duc & Renaud (2011) for an extensive overview on tides in galaxies.
What collisional debris can tell us about galaxies
We consider both the tide raised by the star on the planet and by the planet on the star.
For the moment we assume zero initial eccentricity so that only the stellar tide governs the evolution.
As R∗ shrinks with time, it is clear that for ﬁxed a the stellar dissipation timescale increases with time, so the stellar tide becomes weaker.