Brig

How to spell brig

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce brig

What does brig mean?

1. nounA two-masted sailing vessel rigged with square sails on both masts.
2. nounA prison aboard a naval ship, or a military jail more generally.

Brig in a sentence

• The old brig carried timber across the Baltic for decades.

• The sailor spent three nights in the brig for missing his watch.

• The museum restored a wooden brig from the early nineteenth century.

• Officers ordered the deserter held in the brig until the trial.

Where does brig come from?

Language of origin: Italian

Brig is a clipped form of brigantine, the name of a fast two-masted sailing ship, and it entered English in the early 1700s as sailors shortened the longer word in everyday speech. Brigantine itself came through French and Spanish from the Italian brigantino, which originally meant a small ship used by skirmishers or sea-raiders. That Italian word grew out of brigante, meaning 'one who fights or skirmishes', the same root that gives English the word 'brigand' for a bandit. Over time the warlike sense faded and brig came to mean simply a particular rig of sailing vessel with square sails on both masts. The naval sense of 'a ship's prison', and later any military jail, developed in American usage during the 1800s, because the lockup was often kept aboard such vessels.

How the word is built

• brig (shortened from brigantine, a two-masted sailing vessel)