nausea [LME] Nausea originally meant ‘seasickness’ and is based on the Greek word naus, ‘ship’ also the source of the English word nautical [M16th]. Noise [ME] also comes from nausea—as it developed through Latin and early French, nausea took on a series of meanings that went from ‘seasickness’ to ‘upset, malaise’, and ‘disturbance, uproar’, and so to ‘noise’, which was the word’s spelling and meaning when it first appeared in medieval English.