seachange
sea·change/ˈsiːˌt͡ʃeɪnd͡ʒ/noun
seachange is a noun meaning “A movement of people from cities to rural coastal areas” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled S-E-A-C-H-A-N-G-E and has 2 syllables (sea·change), and it appears about once in every 26 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of seachange is seachanges.
What does seachange mean?
noun
- 1
AustraliaA movement of people from cities to rural coastal areas.
- 2
AustraliaAn act of relocating from an urban to a rural coastal community.
- 3
Alternative form of sea change (“a profound transformation; a metamorphosis”).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce seachange?
- US /ˈsiːˌt͡ʃeɪnd͡ʒ/
Seachange has 2 syllables, split sea·change in writing.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-au-sea_change.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of seachange
- seachanges plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is seachange?
Seachange appears about once in every 26 million words in written English, the 155,937th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Where does seachange come from?
From sea + change; sense 1 (“movement of people from cities to rural coastal areas; act of relocating from an urban to a rural coastal community”) was possibly coined by the Australian author and demographer Bernard Salt in his book The Big Shift (2001), based on the title of the Australian television series SeaChange (1998–2000 and 2019) about a lawyer who moved with her daughters from the city to a coastal town.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).