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You're most likely to encounter littoral in contexts relating to the military and marine sciences. A littoral combat ship is a fast and easily maneuverable combat ship built for use in coastal waters. And in marine ecology, the littoral zone is a coastal zone characterized by abundant dissolved oxygen, sunlight, nutrients, and generally high wave energies and water motion. Littoral can also be found as a noun referring to a coastal region or, more technically, to the shore zone between the high tide and low tide points. The adjective is the older of the two, dating from the mid-17th century; the noun dates from the early 19th century. The word comes to English from Latin litoralis, itself from litor- or litus, meaning "seashore."
Examples of littoral in a Sentence
Shane Croucher
john Feng, MSNBC Newsweek, 16 Sep. 2025
In the days after the collision between the Chinese military vessels, the U.S. deployed the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Higgins and the Independence-class littoral combat ship USS Cincinnati into the South China Sea for a freedom of navigation operation.
—Mike Brest, The Washington Examiner, 13 Sep. 2025
Christopher McFadden, Interesting Engineering, 4 Aug. 2025
Hailing from the peninsula’s steppe interior, mountainous east, and Black Sea littoral, this population tended to be devoutly Muslim and, for the most part, had never been fully at ease with the republic’s secularist founding project.
—Soner Cagaptay, Foreign Affairs, 19 Feb. 2024
See All Example Sentences for littoral
Cite this Entry
“Littoral.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/littoral. Accessed 30 Sep. 2025.
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littoral
1 of 2 adjective
littoral
2 of 2 nounLegal Definition
littoral
adjective
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