"swelling tide" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It is often used to describe a rising or increasing tide, often in a figurative sense. Example sentence: As the election approached, the candidate's popularity grew like a swelling tide, surpassing all expectations.
I've noticed a swelling tide of subway readers clutching Song of Ice and Fire books lately.
The demonstrations are only the latest in a swelling tide of unrest.
The swelling tide of toxic home loans is proving to be even more worrisome than initially feared, Ms. Bair said.
The swelling tide of protests prompted President Dilma Rousseff to cancel a trip next week to Japan, her office said.
She had held back a swelling tide of emotion for several days, but it was clear that if nothing happened boycotts and other ugliness could follow.
A swelling tide of reported anti-gay violence in the city has reached Park Slope, with three assaults in the neighborhood recently.
And the conundrum those new arrivals presented when they washed up not far from here before dawn on Saturday, abandoned by their smugglers, was sharp, too: not only for France, but for a Europe facing swelling tides of illegal immigrants from places as far-flung as Iraq or China.
"Hama is swelling the tide of protests for the rest of Syria".
His sodden lungs, emancipated from machines, hissed and spluttered beneath swelling king tide.
Autumn was a thin season for fiction, publishers fearing that novels would be drowned in the ever-swelling tide of zany stocking fillers and celebrity biographies; so it's a welcome relief to look beyond the Christmas turkeys to find the 2008 schedules full of good things.
Massed on a terraced stage for the play's duration is a cast of two dozen people, their movements and interactions flowing like a tide, swelling together before dispersing into separate components.
