Abstract In the past few years we have unfortunately had several reminders of the ability of a particular type of ocean wave—a tsunami—to devastate coastal areas. The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, in particular, was one of the largest natural disasters of past decades in terms of the number of people killed. The name of this phenomenon, tsunami, is possibly the only term that has entered the physics lexicon from Japanese. We use Japanese and Western sources to document historical tsunami in Europe and Japan, the birth of the scientific understanding of tsunami, and how the Japanese term came to be adopted in English.