by 1823 in representations of Persian or Oriental phrases, or sometimes in reference to seven seas forming part of the Hindu cosmology or to the Talmudists' supposed seven seas of Israel (some of which are obscure lakes); see seven. It is in Burton's "Arabian Nights" (1886) and probably was popularized by one of the versions of Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam (from which Kipling got it as a book title). To the extent that the phrase has been applied, awkwardly, to global geography, they would be the Arctic, Antarctic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, and Indian oceans.