Windjammer
Commercial sailing ship with multiple masts and rig configurations
A windjammer is a commercial sailing ship with multiple masts, however rigged. The informal term "windjammer" arose during the transition from the Age of Sail to the Age of Steam during the 19th century. The Oxford English Dictionary records the term "wind jammer" with reference to a ship from 1878 and nautical use of "windjamming" from 1886. The word has evolved to include sail-powered passenger cruise ships.
01Etymology
The word "windjammer" has a variety of associations, both nautical and not. In the late 19th century the term was pejorative, as used by sailors aboard steamships.
- In 1892, Rudder Magazine said in a story, "The deck hands on the liners contemptuously refer to [sailing vessels] as 'wind-jammers'."
- In 1917, the American Dialect Society recorded residents of the U.S. state of Maine referring to fore-and-aft sailing vessels as "windjammers" in a list of regional word usages.
- The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea calls windjammer "a non-nautical name by which square-rigged sailing ships are sometimes known".
- The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.S. Military calls windjammer "a merchant sailing ship".
- The following languages have adopted "windjammer" as a loanword from English in reference to sailing ships:
- Green's Dictionary of Slang has a variety of non-nautical definitions for the term.
02Examples
Any of the following ships may be called a "windjammer":
03In literature
Windjammers have figured prominently in both historical and fictional literature. Some examples include:
- Allen, Oliver E. (1978). The Windjammers. Amsterdam: Time-Life Books. ISBN 9780705406253.
- Lubbock, Basil (1953). The Last of the Windjammers. Brown, Son & Ferguson.
- Noppen, Ryan K. (2015). German Commerce Raiders 1914-18. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781472809513.
- Richardson, V. A. (2006). The House of Windjammer. Bloomsbury USA. ISBN 9781582349848.
- Runciman, Walter Sr. (1902). Windjammers and Sea Tramps. London: At the Unicorn.
- Simpson, Paul W. (2017). Windjammer. Lulu. ISBN 9780244305727.
- Thomas, Lowell (2013). The Sea Devil: The Story Of Count Felix Von Luckner, The German War Raider. Read Books. ISBN 9781446548196.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Windjammer”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Luther Little1917.jpg by Unknown (Life time: N/A), Public domain
- Herzogin Cecilie SLV AllenGren.jpg by Allan C. Green, Public domain
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