יָם

The word "יָם" (yam) in its original meaning refers to a large body of water and appears many times in the Bible. However, in modern Israeli Hebrew, the word has developed an additional slang meaning - "a lot, a large amount," as in the sentence "There's a sea of time until the show." The slang use of the word began to become popular in the late 1980s. Evidence of this can be found in an interview with Felix Hayon from Herzliya published in Maariv in 1989, which quotes the sentence "Because of the change we went down from 14 to 13, and lost a sea of money." This form of expression is commonly seen as a shortening of the literary phrase "ים של" (yam shel, "a sea of," for example "a sea of possibilities"). However, it is also possible that it is borrowed from the Arabic word "ياما" (yama), a compound of the vocative particle "يا" (ya) and the question word "ما" (ma), which is used in Arabic to emphasize a large quantity, with a meaning similar to "how much!" in Hebrew. This borrowing could have been shortened to "ים" (yam) with the understanding that it refers to that large body of water. This word itself is also the suspected source of "יַמְבָּה" (yamba), another slang word denoting a large quantity, which entered Hebrew in the early 1990s.