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PlainSpell

seel

/siːl/noun, verb

seel is a noun meaning “Good fortune; happiness; bliss” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled S-E-E-L and has one syllable, and it appears about once in every 9 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of seel is seels.

What does seel mean?

noun

  1. 1

    UKGood fortune; happiness; bliss.

  2. 2

    UKOpportunity; time; season.

    the seel of the day

  3. 3

    obsoleteThe rolling or agitation of a ship in a storm.

verb

  1. 1

    To sew together the eyelids of a young hawk.

  2. 2

    To blind.

  3. 3

    obsoleteTo roll on the waves in a storm.

adjective

  1. 1

    obsoleteGood; fortunate; opportune; happy.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce seel?

  • /siːl/

Seel has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Forms of seel

  • more seel comparative
  • most seel superlative
  • seels plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • seal
  • seeling participle, present
  • seeled participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is seel?

Seel appears about once in every 9 million words in written English, the 87,317th 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).

Words people confuse with seel

Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).

seal vs seel1,600 G

Sounds like: seal (Wiktionary's homophone list; some hold only in some accents).

Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).

Seel in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense To sew together the eyelids of a young hawk:

LanguageWords
Frenchciller

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does seel come from?

From Middle English sele, sel, from Old English sǣl (“time, occasion, a fit time, season, opportunity, the definite time at which an event should take place, time as in bad or good times, circumstances, condition, position, happiness, joy, good fortune, good time, prosperity”), from Proto-Germanic *sēliz (“luck, joy”), from Proto-Indo-European *sel-, *sēl- (“to calm, quiet, be favourable”). Cognate with Icelandic sæla (“bliss”), Dutch zalig (“blissful, blessed”). More at silly.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).