Whenever you hear the word mediterranean, do you think of that specific place and perhaps of the great cultures that have surrounded it? You should know that the word can also apply to any large body of water that is surrounded completely or almost completely by dry land. This usage goes back to the use in Late Latin of the Latin word mediterraneus, the source of our word, as part of the name Mediterraneum mare for the mostly landlocked Mediterranean Sea.
Keep in mind that Latin mediterraneus, which is derived from medius, "the middle of, the heart of," and terra, "land", in Classical Latin actually meant "remote from the coast, inland".
In Late Latin, in referring to the sea, mediterraneus probably originally meant "in the middle of the earth" rather than "surrounded by land", because to the Mediterranean cultures without knowledge of much of the earth, the Mediterranean Sea was in the center of the world. Our word mediterranean is first recorded in English, in 1594, as the name of the sea.