Sail

Part of speech: noun, verb

Pronunciation: /seɪl/

Definitions

1. A piece of fabric attached to a boat's mast that catches wind to propel the vessel forward across water
2. A fabric surface on a mast used to capture wind, which propels a vessel through water while allowing navigation and movement across aquatic environments
3. A canvas or cloth that is fixed to a mast and utilized to harness wind power, enabling a watercraft to traverse the surface of a body of water effectively

Etymology: Sail is a word that has been doing two jobs for over a thousand years: the cloth that catches the wind, and the act of moving by that wind. The noun comes from Old English "segl", which goes back to a Germanic root shared with modern German "Segel" and Dutch "zeil". The verb came from Old English "seglan" and "siglan", meaning to move by sail, and it likewise traces back to Germanic roots that also produced German "segeln" and Swedish "segla". What is striking is how closely the two words stayed bound together. Across all the Germanic languages, the cloth and the voyage share the same family resemblance, which suggests the object and the action were named together from the start, long before ships had anything to do with the sea in a modern sense. Nothing in the record suggests a later shift from one meaning to the other; the noun and verb simply grew up side by side in English.

Synonyms: canvas, sheet

Antonyms: anchor