If you live near (or visit) the ocean, you’ve probably paid at least a bit of attention to the tides. But there are also other kinds of tides, like “Yuletide” for the Christmas season — and those tides came first. Sort of.
“Tide” originally came from German (“tidiz”) and didn’t at first have anything to do with water at all; it just referred to time. So “Yuletide” just means “Yule time”, or “the time when you burn the Yule log”. Ocean water still went up and down according to the orbit of the moon, of course, but it wasn’t called a “tide” until the 1300s.
When the idea of “tides” caught on, it didn’t take long for people who live and work on and near the ocean to coin words for particular kinds of tides. One example is the “ebb tide,” first mentioned (in print, at least) in the 1700s. It’s a tide flowing away from land, or “ebbing.” “Ebb” comes from the Old English word “ebba”, which simply meant “of” or “from.” More recently, since its only use for a long time had been in connection with that tide, and in an ebb tide the water level at shore goes down, “ebb” has come to mean a reduction or lessening of any sort.
When the tide is moving — which is most of the time, either toward or away from whatever land you happen to care about — boats need to contend with “tide flow”, which is the speed and direction of the water itself, at least when its motion is caused by the tide. When you get too much tidal flow toward land, it’s a “flood tide.” This one is pretty obvious; it’s a high tide that’s so high it causes flooding. A flood tide is often the same as a “spring tide.” The “spring” in this case has nothing to do with the season; it refers to a tide that “springs up.” “Spring tides” are extra-high because they occur during a full moon and/or a new moon. From a gravitational perspective, of course, the full and new moons occur when the earth, moon, and sun are all lined up, so the tide, which is mostly a lunar effect, gets an extra boost from the sun’s gravity. “Spring tides” are also called “king tides” in some places.
If you have a special word for the kind of tide you get when the earth, moon, and sun are all in a single line, you need a word for when they form (roughly) a right angle, too. Those tides are still high tides, but they’re not as high because the moon’s gravity is pulling in one direction while the Sun’s is tugging to the side. Those are called “neap tides.” If “neap” sounds like a sort of strange thing to call a tide, seeing as how all the other tides have pretty sensible names, well, you’re right. What makes it odder is that nobody has any idea where “neap” originated or what it meant (if anything) before it referred to a tide.
By the way, back to Yuletide for a moment, some old Christmas carols refer to “tidings,” as in “good tidings we bring…”. “Tidings” in this case seems to be only somewhat related to “tide.” It comes from the Old English word “tidung.” “Tidung” meant “news,” and probably came from the Old Norse word “tithr,” which meant “occurring.” But since tides are generally quite regular and predictable, you might rely on tidal flow to bring tidings, but your tidings wouldn’t be tide tidings, because it’s not news if everybody already knows about it!
