Seachange
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A movement of people from cities to rural coastal areas. Australia, uncountable
"The seachange shift was initiated by retirees from the late 1960s although it did acquire a spiritual status when embraced by the boomers from 2001 onwards. […] The drivers of treechange and seachange are the same: people wanting a simpler life in a pleasant town with all the amenities not too far from their interests in the city."
- 2 An act of relocating from an urban to a rural coastal community. Australia, countable
"Surrey […] was negotiating with his wife to move the family (two teenaged girls, reluctant to leave their high school friends) to Tathra and a new house, perhaps with a view of the sea. The trick was going to be maintaining the loyalty of his longstanding if slow-paying rural clients, when he planned to spend most of his time on the coast, away from the extremes of the Goulburn climate ('Either too cold, too hot, too dry, too windy, or too wet,' he was wont to say). There had proved to be lots of minor crime on the coast, which augured well for the seachange."
- 3 Alternative form of sea change (“a profound transformation; a metamorphosis”). alt-of, alternative, countable, uncountable
"It is interesting to watch how the most unpromising subject seems to warm and assimilate with his [John Randolph of Roanoke's] genius. Everything undergoes a seachange."
Example
More examples"The seachange shift was initiated by retirees from the late 1960s although it did acquire a spiritual status when embraced by the boomers from 2001 onwards. […] The drivers of treechange and seachange are the same: people wanting a simpler life in a pleasant town with all the amenities not too far from their interests in the city."
Etymology
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.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.