“Full fathom five”

What it means

Drowned; lost at sea.

Where it comes from

Thirty feet of water, from Ariel’s song in The Tempest. Shakespeare chose a depth his audience could picture precisely, because every sailor and dockworker reckoned in fathoms.

How sure are we?

From The Tempest, around 1611. The specificity is deliberate: five fathoms is a real, imaginable depth rather than a poetic abstraction.

The units behind it

fathom

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