Oceans in Different Languages: from the Arctic to the Southern Ocean

Five oceans, hundreds of names

An ocean name usually has two parts: a word for the open sea and a qualifier that says which one. The word changes from language to language far more than the qualifier does. Russian says океан, Finnish valtameri, Lithuanian vandenynas, Hindi महासागर (mahāsāgar), “great sea”, and Chinese, Japanese and Korean share the character 洋, read yáng, yō and yang. Quechua builds the word from mama qucha, “mother lake”, so the Pacific is Pasiphiku mama qucha.

The qualifiers fall into three kinds. Some are names: Atlantic comes from Atlas, Indian from India. Some are descriptions: the Arctic is the icy or the northern ocean, the Pacific the quiet or the great one. And some point to a direction, as Southern does. Languages pick between these freely: German has three names for the Arctic Ocean, Turkish five.

Each table below covers one ocean. Languages that write the name the same way share a row, with their ISO 639 codes. Languages written in more than one script, such as Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Kazakh, Serbian, Tatar or Uzbek, get one row per script, and the romanisation column gives a letter-by-letter Latin key for names in Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Georgian, Armenian, Ethiopic, Devanagari, Thai and the East Asian scripts. Where a cell holds several names, they are separated by semicolons, most common first.

How the ocean names are built

A few patterns explain most of the forms in the tables.

Ice in the north

The Arctic Ocean is named for its ice in a long row of languages. Spanish and Galician say Océano Glacial Ártico, Italian Mare Glaciale Artico, Polish Ocean Lodowaty Północny, Czech Severní ledový oceán, Lithuanian Šiaurės Ledinuotasis vandenynas and Georgian ჩრდილოეთი ყინულოვანი ოკეანე (Č̣rdiloeṭi qinulovani okeane). The Azerbaijani Şimal buzlu okeanı and the Turkish Kuzey Buz Okyanusu follow the same model, Northern Ice Ocean. Old Norse had its own word, Dumbshaf, which Icelandic still keeps beside Norður-Íshaf.

Quiet or great

Pacific translates Latin pacificus, peaceful. Russian Тихий океан (Tiȟij okean), Czech and Slovak Tichý oceán, Polish Ocean Spokojny, Lithuanian Ramusis vandenynas, Finnish Tyyni valtameri and Hungarian Csendes-óceán all mean the quiet ocean. Others stress its size: Russian Великий океан (Velikij okean), Turkish Büyük Okyanus and Lithuanian Didysis vandenynas. Māori calls it Te Moana nui ā Kiwa, the great ocean of Kiwa.

The Southern Ocean

The Southern Ocean is the youngest of the five as a named unit. Its boundaries, from the coast of Antarctica to 60° South, were proposed to the International Hydrographic Organization in 2000 and have not been ratified by its members; the U.S. Board on Geographic Names recognises the ocean with that limit.¹ Many languages had a name for these waters long before, usually Antarctic: Oceanus Antarcticus in Latin, Antarktičeskij okean in Russian, Oceano Antártico in Portuguese.