Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The entire body of salt water that covers more than 70 percent of the earth's surface.
  • noun Any of the principal divisions of the ocean, including the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Southern Oceans.
  • noun A great expanse or amount.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The body of water which envelops the earth, and covers almost three fourths of its surface with a mean depth — as nearly as can be estimated at the present time — of less than 12,500 feet.
  • noun Something likened to the ocean; also, a great quantity: as, an ocean of trouble.
  • Of or pertaining to the main or great sea.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The whole body of salt water which covers more than three fifths of the surface of the globe; -- called also the sea, or great sea.
  • noun One of the large bodies of water into which the great ocean is regarded as divided, as the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic and Antarctic oceans.
  • noun An immense expanse; any vast space or quantity without apparent limits
  • adjective Of or pertaining to the main or great sea

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun countable One of the five large bodies of water separating the continents.
  • noun uncountable Water belonging to an ocean.
  • noun figuratively An immense expanse; any vast space or quantity without apparent limits.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun anything apparently limitless in quantity or volume
  • noun a large body of water constituting a principal part of the hydrosphere

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English occean, from Old French, from Latin ōceanus, from Greek Ōkeanos, the god Oceanus, a great river encircling the earth.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French occean (later reborrowed from Middle French ocean), from Latin Oceanus, from Ancient Greek Ὠκεανός (Ōkeanós, "Oceanus", a water deity).

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Examples

  • And, of course, the ocean is the perfect place to hide.

    Susan Casey - An interview with author 2010

  • Like birds plunging into the ocean is a sign of baitfish.

    Are You A Birdwatcher? 2009

  • Pushing your luck on the ocean is a terrible idea, Things can go wrong so fast out there, and when offshore like they were, no one is around to get your butt out of a sticky situation.

    An Ugly Way To Die 2009

  • If dropping iron dust into the ocean is a great idea, then let's just get on with it.

    Free Market or Artificial Market?, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009

  • Coming from the hills of North GA to the ocean is a huge treat.

    The Call of the Surf 2009

  • Coming from the hills of North GA to the ocean is a huge treat.

    The Call of the Surf 2009

  • Pushing your luck on the ocean is a terrible idea, Things can go wrong so fast out there, and when offshore like they were, no one is around to get your butt out of a sticky situation.

    An Ugly Way To Die 2009

  • Somewhere on this ocean is a ship that's heading right for us.

    Bunches of Knuckles 2010

  • Like birds plunging into the ocean is a sign of baitfish.

    Are You A Birdwatcher? 2009

  • I realize that the ocean is the worlds largest heat sink, but if you were to put a few thousand of these in the gulf of mexico, I would think it would affect oceanic life by dramatically changing the temperature at depth.

    Artificial Energy Islands Could Power The World | Inhabitat 2008

  • When Cambridge Analytica contracted Aleksandr Kogan of Cambridge University for its psychographics project, it was to implement a digital survey on Facebook that would, like the Big 5 Inventory but adapted into the form of an online quiz, capture intimate personal data on users’ ‘openness’, ‘conscientiousness’, ‘extroversion’, ‘agreeableness’ and ‘neuroticism’ (OCEAN).

    Learning from psychographic personality profiling code acts in education 2018

Comments

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  • The H.M.S. Ocean was listed as a "transport" captured at Yorktown in 1781. I wonder if, when it was sailing the Atlantic, it was camouflaged.

    October 29, 2007