navy

UK/ˈneɪvi/US/ˈneɪvi/

nounB23 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,254 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: navies

The navy is the part of a country's armed forces that fights at sea: the ships, the submarines, and the people who serve on them. You join the navy at eighteen, serve twenty years in the navy, and come out knowing how to tie things properly.

Navy is also a colour, short for navy blue, the very dark blue of a sailor's uniform, which is exactly where the colour got its name. A navy suit, navy tights, a wall painted navy. In Britain the service is the Royal Navy, capitalised because it is a name, while the navy in general stays lowercase. The adjective for anything to do with a navy is naval, as in a naval officer or a naval base, and it is worth keeping that apart from navel, which is your belly button.

Definitions of navy

1nounnavyThe branch of a country's armed forces that fights at sea.B2~96%
“The navy sent two ships to help with the rescue.”
2adjectivecolourOf a very dark blue colour.B1~2%
“She wore a navy coat with the collar turned up.”
3noundarkA very dark blue colour.B2~2%
“The whole uniform is navy apart from the white shirt.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 7 sentences found in the wild and placed 7 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Also practised as

adjectiveA very dark blue.

Where it comes from

Navy came through Middle English navye and Old French navie from Latin nāvigium, a fleet, built on nāvis, a boat. The root is the Proto-Indo-European word for ship, which also gave Greek naus and Sanskrit nāva. It pushed out the older English word for the same thing, sċiphere, which meant ship-army.

Latin
nāvigia
Old French
navie
Middle English
nave
English, today
navy

Built from

nāvis · Latin — boat

From Middle English nave, navye, from Anglo-Norman -, Old French navie, from Latin nāvigia < nāvigium, from Latin nāvigō, nāvis (“boat”), from Proto-Indo-European néh₂us. Compare Ancient Greek ναῦς (“ship”), Persian ناو (“boat, warship”), Sanskrit नाव (“ship”), Old English nōwend (“mariner, sailor”). by surface analysis, nav- + -y. Displaced native sċiphere.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

navy in the wild

The Kriegsmarine was the navy of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945.
Kriegsmarine
From the early 18th century until the Second World War, it was the world's most powerful navy.
Royal Navy
The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was the navy of the Empire of Japan from 1868 to 1945, when it was dissolved following Japan's surrender in World War II.
Imperial Japanese Navy
The IJN was the third largest navy in the world by 1920, behind the Royal Navy and the United States Navy (USN).
Imperial Japanese Navy
The Chief of Naval Staff, a four-star admiral, commands the navy.
Indian Navy

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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.

Related words

the nāvis family

navy

navy — used about once every 130 pages · #1,254 · point at the bar for the others

Definitions of navy

1nounnavyThe branch of a country's armed forces that fights at sea.B2~96%

“The navy sent two ships to help with the rescue.”

2adjectivecolourOf a very dark blue colour.B1~2%

“She wore a navy coat with the collar turned up.”

3noundarkA very dark blue colour.B2~2%

“The whole uniform is navy apart from the white shirt.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 7 sentences found in the wild and placed 7 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.