Corvette

How to spell corvette

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce corvette

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does corvette mean?

1. nounA small, fast, lightly armed naval vessel, often used for patrol or escort duties.

Corvette in a sentence

• The navy deployed a single corvette to guard the supply convoy.

• The museum harbour displays a restored wartime corvette from the 1940s.

Where does corvette come from?

Language of origin: French

Corvette came into English from French corvette, the name for a small, fast, lightly armed sailing warship. The French word is usually traced back to the Latin corbita, which described a slow, broad merchant ship built to carry burdens; that in turn rests on corbis, the ordinary Latin word for a 'basket', a nod to the rounded, basket-like hull of such vessels. Some scholars instead connect it to Middle Dutch korf, also meaning 'basket', which would point to the same homely image by a Low Country route. The little ending -ette is the familiar French diminutive, so a corvette was understood as a small ship of its class. English adopted the term in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as European navies expanded, and in the twentieth century the name was revived for fast escort warships and later borrowed by a famous American sports car. The doubled 't' before the diminutive -ette is the spelling point worth fixing in memory, since the single-stressed final syllable hides it.

How the word is built

• corv- (ship, from Latin corbita: a basket-shaped cargo ship)
• -ette (French diminutive: small)