carrack

US/ˈkæɹək/

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechmostly written

Other forms: carracks

A carrack is a broad high-castled merchant ship of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A Portuguese carrack.

It was the first European ship built to cross oceans and carry cargo worth the voyage. The carrack grew into the galleon, which kept the seaworthiness and lost the towering castles.

Definitions of carrack

1nouncarrackA broad, high-castled merchant sailing ship of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, forerunner of the galleon.C2
“The carrack carried three hundred tons and a crew of eighty.”

carrack is a ship.

Where it comes from

French caraque goes back to Latin carraca and ultimately to carrus, a wagon.

Latin
carraca
French
caraque
English, today
carrack

From French caraque (compare Spanish - and Portuguese - carraca, Italian caracca), from Latin carraca, from Latin carrus (“wagon”); or perhaps from Arabic قَرَاقِير.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

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carrack in the wild

Evolving from the single-masted cog, the carrack was first used for European trade from the Mediterranean to the Baltic.
Carrack
The later carracks were square-rigged on the foremast and mainmast and lateen-rigged on the mizzenmast.
Carrack
Victoria or Nao Victoria (Spanish for "Victory") was a carrack famed as the first ship to successfully circumnavigate the world.
Victoria (ship)
The carrack (Spanish: nao) was built at a Spanish shipyard in Ondarroa.
Victoria (ship)
The English were victorious in battle, sinking two galleys, forced the rest to retreat, neutralized the fort, and captured the carrack.
Battle of Sesimbra Bay

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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