Humans have been traveling the waterways and the briny deep as means of trade, transportation, and exploration for many thousands of years. It is little wonder then that these ocean voyagers, sometimes asea for months and years at a time, developed a unique dialect that is rather arcane to the landlubber. Among seamen their lingo is worn as a badge of honor while it also serves to define and differentiate them from the landlubber. This differentiation is well illustrated by Herman Melville in his sailing novel, Redburn. His first Voyage.
People who have never gone to sea … as sailors, can not imagine how puzzling and confounding it is … For sailors have their own names, even for things that are familiar ashore; and if you call a thing by its shore name, you are laughed at for an ignoramus and a landlubber.
The roots of nauticalese go back many hundreds of years and involve many languages. While the seaman’s jargon sets him apart on the one hand, he eventually must come ashore and interact with those ignorant landlubbers. Like all cultures that interact over time, some language assimilation takes place among the dialects allowing previously “foreign, sea jargon” to creep silently into daily parlance of the mainstream. Over time the word origins are lost to all but the linguists and members of the in-group. Some words come more or less directly from other languages while others are constructed by the sailors themselves over time to connote specific objects and functions unique to their craft.
A study of nauticalese etymology informs us of the origins of many words commonly used today and most are used with little or no apparent relationship to the sea. This assimilation has provided the English language with many useful and colorful terms. For example, we all know about being nauseated from riding in the back seat of a car, being on a roller coaster, having eaten something that does not agree with us, or being seasick. However, it is less well known that the root of “nausea” is the same as nautical. The Greek word for “ship” is naus, and nautikos refers to ships and sailors on the sea, all of which call to mind the ultimate source of nausea!
This nauticalese dialect has many hundreds of words. Some are borrowed or adopted directly from a parent language like nausea, while others, fashioned on ships’ parts and sailors’ duties, evolve with time and experience.
Consider the following vignette:
Many a football fan attended a Sunday night Super Bowl party recently. Those who stayed to the bitter end and imbibed too much grog may have ended up being three sheets to the wind by then end of the game. Those poor souls had a Blue Monday in the offing in which they may well have been taken aback to find themselves overwhelmed with nausea.
If they made it to work at all on Monday, by and large they felt rather under the weather and listless while standing in a queue waiting to use the head. Nonetheless, there was probably plenty of football scuttlebutt to share while chewing the fat around the water cooler.
This tortured little vignette contains 15 nautical terms or phrases that have come into common usage in the English language and here none were used with direct reference to the sea. Their definitions and origins are explained as follows:
1. The bitter end: The short end of a working rope such that attached to an anchor is often tied to a sturdy post with cross bars on the boat called a bitt. The end attached to the bitt is called the bitter end while the other end that is attached directly to the anchor itself is called the working end. When you reach the bitter end of the line, that is as far as you can go, there is no line left. Bitt comes from the Old Norse, bitti, meaning cross beam.
A modern bitt with two posts and a cross beam
2. Grog: It was Royal Naval custom until 1970, to issue the mates a pint of rum each day. However, Admiral, Sir Edward Vernon, called Old Grog changed the custom aboard his ships. He was known as Old Grog for the coarse woven cloak that he wore that was made of grogram fabric, (French for gros, grain). The Admiral gained infamy when he ordered the rum on his ship to be diluted with water to prevent drunkenness, or grogginess among his sailors. The unhappy sailors named the diluted drink after their infamous admiral.
3. Three sheets to the wind. On a sail boat, a sheet is a line that controls the trim of a sail. If this line is let loose the sail will flop and flutter, leaving the boat without control. Thus, letting the sheets loose to the wind, is similar to the inebriate who stumbles around with little control -the stereotypical drunken sailor.
4. Blue Monday: According to naval rules and customs, punishment for infractions was meted out on Mondays. Hence, Mondays were not something to be looked forward to. Often it was when the cat (of nine tails) was let out of the bag.
Cat O Nine Tails, here from Australian penal colony
5. Offing: The offing refers to a general area of water that lies between where a ship is moored in a harbor and the horizon. It is an area within sight and fairly close at hand.
6. Overwhelm: Over comes from Old English (ofer) which is similar to the Sanskrit equivalent, (upari). Whelm comes from Old English gehwelfan (to bend over) and helmian, to cover. By way of middle English the word whelven, means to turn upside down. An overwhelmed ship is one that is overcome by natural forces of wind and water. Due to these forces the ship is bent over, turned upside down, and covered with water. A boat (or person) who is overcome with external forces is said to be overwhelmed and cannot function normally.
7. By and Large: When a ship is sailing with the wind at its stern with lots of air pushing, it is said to be sailing “large,” as in “free,” or “at large.” When a ship is sailing as close as she can into the wind but is able to keep just enough wind in the sails along with some aerodynamics of the sail to maintain forward motion, the ship is said to be sailing by (the wind). So, a ship that could sail by and large was one that could maintain headway under most wind conditions whether ill or fair. Today, by and large means "on the whole" "generally speaking", "all things considered."
Wind is from the back filling sails - large
8. Nausea: See above.
9. Taken aback: When a ship tries to sail too close into the wind (into it) and its sails fill from the fore, (from the direction they are heading) the sails would press back against the mast in the wrong direction. They would stop or go backwards. Thus, their progress would be abruptly stopped or “taken aback.”
10. Under the weather: This phrase refers to conditions that are under the “weather bow” or the side of a ship’s bow that was taking a pounding from heavy wind and waves. Sailors used the term also to refer to sea sickness that could result from when elements were rough.
11. Listless: When a ship has wind in its sails, it moves forward but tilts to the side away from the wind. That is it "lists." When there is no wind it has no list and the boat does not move. It is motionless or listless. This typically happens when in the doldrums.
Wind tilts or lists the boat Without wind (becalmed) it is listless
12. Queue: This term is used more popularly in UK but is often seen in the US. It comes from the braded pigtail that sailors used to wear and in which they took great pride. Sailors paired up with buddies who braided each other’s “pig tails” or queues. Queue comes most directly comes from French, (queue), and Latin, cauda (tail) and means a line or tail. Although not definitive, the style might have come from Manchu to China to France, and finally to England.
13. Head: The head or bow portion of the ship is where the figurehead was placed, typically with a bowsprit extending further forward. Just behind this area boxes were placed on either side of the bow which served as the toilets or "heads." There was a grate underneath where excrement dropped and was flushed clean by the sea water splashing through. Hence the head or "heads" is a sailing term for lavatory, rest room, loo, etc.
Figure head on bow of the ship See boxes- heads on both sides. Seats missing. From war ship Vasa, Sweden .
14. Scuttlebutt: On sailing ships fresh drinking water was often a precious resource and was stored in casks call butts. A small butt was on deck for sailors to drink from. To ensure that this fresh water would last while at sea, a hole was cut in the side (a scuttle) so that the butt on deck could not be filled up and wasted. Sailors congregated around the scuttle butt to talk and pass on gossip, like what occurs around the modern water cooler.
15. Chewing the fat: In old sailing ships, salted pork, stored in casks was one staple food that did not go bad on board ship. On long voyages, sailors would talk, grouse, and complain as they chewed their salted pork rations. The term “chewing the fat” had a more negative connotation then relative to today where it connotes a more casual chat session.
There are several thousand of such terms and phrases that make up this dialect of English as illustrated in the reference sources listed at the end of this post. Below I note just a few additional terms not used in the vignette. These nautical terms are more common in boating circles. As you will see, they come quite directly from other languages through the assimilation process, yet we use them as our own. Like nausea, others too have been adopted pretty much outright. A few examples include:
1. Catamaran is a term used in boating circles to indicate a sail boat with two narrow hulls connected by a deck that might be simply canvass stretched on a frame or a more formal hard deck with a cabin. The term comes from Southern India (Tamil) where kata means to tie, and maram, means wood. Thus tying two or more logs together to make a raft-like vessel was a catamaran.
Original catamaran style used in southern India Modern day catamaran style - two hulls
2. Dinghy comes from Hindi as dingi, a small boat. Today, a dinghy, also called a tender, is towed or carried on a larger boat that cannot operate in shallow water. The dinghy ferries the boaters to shore and back.
A typical Dinghy hanging on davits
3. Caboose comes from German kabuse or Dutch combius, meaning a small hut. Aboard smaller ships, it was the galley or where they cooked. It was a small structure usually located on deck. Now caboose refers to the last car on a train, or a chuck wagon on the range, all associated with food preparation.
4. Bonanza comes from the Spanish word, bonanza, meaning “to sail with fair winds.” This positive connotation was said to have been picked up from would-be prospectors sailing to the California gold fields in the mid 1840s. It came into English as meaning prosperity or something special in abundant supply, such as a gold find.
References Sources:
A big thanks to Wu Ming, Dr. Lori, and Bluefin for their additions and corrections to this post.
1. Ensign, The, Official Magazine of the United States Sail and Power Squadrons.
2. Gidmark, J. B. Melville Sea Dictionary: A glossed concordance and analysis of sea language in Melville’s nautical novels. London, England, 1982
3. Hendrickson, R., Word and Phrase Origins, Checkmark Books, NY, 1997
4. Isil, O. A., When a loose cannon flogs a dead horse, you have the devil to pay” International Marine. 1996,
5. Malony, E.S. Chapman Piloting, Seamanship, and Small Boat Handling, (62nd Ed), Hearst Marinebooks, NY, 1996.
6. McKinna, R. The Dictionary of Nautical literacy, McGraw-Hill,/International Marine, NY, 2001
7. Melville, H., Redburn: His first Voyage, Harper, NY, 1849
8. Murray, J.H, et al., eds., Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, UK, 1970
9. O’Brian, P., The Jack Aubrey Novels. London, Collins ( 1969 – 2004)
(A series of 20 novels (one unfinished) authentically depicting the Royal British Navy during the latter 18th Century and early 19th Century.)
10. Sola, D. f. (Ed). The Spanish Vest Pocket Dictionary, Random House, NY, 1954
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