sloop

UK/sluːp/US/sluːp/

nounC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,935 of 15,258mostly written

Other forms: sloops

A sloop is a small sailing boat with one mast. Sail a sloop, a Bermuda sloop, the sloop put in.

It carries one mast with a mainsail and a single headsail, which is much the commonest rig on modern yachts because it is simple and sails well upwind. In the navy a sloop was a small warship, and the word had nothing to do with the rig.

Definitions of sloop

1nounsloopA small sailing boat with one mast.C2
“They sailed a small sloop along the coast, stopping at a different harbour each night.”

sloop is a boat.

Where it comes from

Dutch sloep names the boat. Shallop and chalupa are the same word by other routes.

Dutch
sloep
English, today
sloop

Borrowed from Dutch sloep. a doublet of chalupa and shallop.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

sloop in the wild

As with many rig definitions, it was some time before the term sloop referred to the type of rig.
Sloop
The Bermuda sloop is a historical type of fore-and-aft rigged single-masted sailing vessel developed on the islands of Bermuda in the 17th century.
Bermuda sloop
During the 18th and 19th centuries, a sloop-of-war was a warship of the Royal Navy with a single gun deck that carried up to 18 guns.
Sloop-of-war
The Black Swan class and Modified Black Swan class were two classes of sloop of the Royal Navy and Royal Indian Navy.
Black Swan-class sloop
The term sloop returned during World War I for vessels dedicated to convoy escort.
List of corvette and sloop classes of the Royal 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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

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