Word.ws English Dictionary

seel

/siːl/

seel adjective: good; fortunate; opportune; happy.

Adjective

seel (comparative more seel, superlative most seel)

  1. (obsolete) Good; fortunate; opportune; happy.

Noun (1)

seel (plural seels)

  1. (UK, dialectal) Good fortune; happiness; bliss.
  2. (UK, dialectal) Opportunity; time; season.
    • the seel of the day

Verb (1)

seel (third-person singular simple present seels, present participle seeling, simple past and past participle seeled)

  1. To sew together the eyelids of a young hawk.
    • Hey who does blindly soar at Rhodalind[…]
      Mounts, like seel'd doves, still higher[…]1651, William Davenant, Gondibert
  2. (broadly) To blind.

Verb (2)

seel (third-person singular simple present seels, present participle seeling, simple past and past participle seeled)

  1. (intransitive, obsolete) To roll on the waves in a storm.
    • when a Ship seels or rowls in foul Weatherc. 1611, Walter Raleigh, Observations on the Navy and Sea Service

Noun (2)

seel (plural seels)

  1. (obsolete) The rolling or agitation of a ship in a storm.
    • The ship hulls as the billows flow; / And all aboard at ev'ry seel, / Like drunkards, on the hatches reel.1636, G[eorge] S[andys], “(please specify the page)”, in A Paraphrase upon the Psalmes of David. And upon the Hymnes Dispersed throughout the Old and New Testaments, London: [Andrew Hebb […]], →OCLC

Forms of seel

Adjective
comparativemore seel
superlativemost seel
Noun
pluralseels
alternative formseal
Verb
third-person singular presentseels
present participleseeling
past participleseeled
pastseeled

Origin of seel

From Middle English sel, sele, from Old English *sǣle (“good, fortunate, happy”) (attested in Old English unsǣle (“evil, wicked”)), from Proto-Germanic *sēliz (“good, happy”), from Proto-Indo-European *sel-, *sēl- (“to calm, quiet, be favourable”). Cognate with Danish sæl (“blissful”), Dutch zalig (“blissful”), Gothic 𐍃𐌴𐌻𐍃 (sēls, “good, kind, useful”), Icelandic sæll (“blissful”), Latin sōlor (“to comfort, console”), Swedish säll (“blissful”).

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.

From Middle English silen, from Old French siller, ciller (“to sew up the eyelids of, hoodwink, wink”), from cil (“eyelid”), from Latin cilium (“eyelid, eyelash”).

Words formed from seel

Words that rhyme with seel

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about seel

What does seel mean?
Seel means good; fortunate; opportune; happy.
What part of speech is seel?
Seel can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce seel?
Seel is pronounced /siːl/.

Words near seel in the dictionary

  1. seeks one's fortune
  2. seeks one's virtuous couch
  3. seeks out
  4. seeksorrow
  5. seeksorrows
  6. seel
  7. Seeland
  8. Seelands
  9. seeled
  10. Seeley
  11. Seeley's pigs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: seel (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “seel.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/seel. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.