Dictionary

king tide en · NOUN

Etymology

From king (“something preeminent”) + tide, perhaps chosen for the rhyme with spring tide.

Meanings

1. (informal) An unusually high spring tide that occurs during full moon in the summer and winter months (when the earth is at perihelion and the earth, moon and sun are aligned).
   • 1994, Netherlands Institute for the Law of the Sea, International Organizations and the Law of the Sea: Documentary Yearbook, 1992, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, page 373, As an illustration of our vulnerability, in 1990 and again in 1991, the largest king tides of the year in the Marshall Islands almost inundated Majuro′s urban area.
   • 2008, David Corlett, Stormy Weather: The Challenge of Climate Change and Displacement, UNSW Press, page 8, The unprecedented 2006 king tide was alarming.
   • 2010, Margaret Somerville, Tony Perkins, Singing the Coast, Aboriginal Studies Press, page 91, Other fish, prawns and crabs come into the Lake on the king tides and swim up to the warm backwaters to breed.
   • 2008, Bob Shepherd, Circuit, Pan MacMillan, UK, unnumbered page, He told me that due to the interaction of certain moon phases with the broken coastline and offlying islands in that region, once every four years for four days they experience what are known as ‘king tides’. These tides can rise twenty feet above normal tide levels. The king tide phenomenon was not recorded in the tide tables or charts, so I had no way of knowing they existed when planning the exercise.
   • Exceptionally high tides, known colloquially as king tides, along the state’s coast reached record levels for the summer in the week that followed the students’ deaths, and have added to the hazardous conditions at beaches. 2026 June 18, Ali Watkins, Amy Graff, “Large Waves Sweep Napping Beachgoers in California Into the Sea”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:

Forms

Hypernyms

spring tide

Translations (3)

gl mareas vivas (exceptionally high spring tides that occur on occasion) · mi ngā tai a Kupe (exceptionally high spring tides that occur on occasion) · gl marea viva (exceptionally high spring tides that occur on occasion)