Cruise

How to spell cruise

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cruise

What does cruise mean?

1. verbTo travel smoothly at a steady, comfortable speed, especially by ship, car, or aircraft.
2. nounA voyage taken on a ship for pleasure, usually stopping at several ports.

Cruise in a sentence

• verb

  The aircraft began to cruise at thirty-five thousand feet.

• noun

  They booked a two-week cruise around the Mediterranean.

• verb

  They like to cruise along the coast road on warm evenings.

• noun

  The cruise included shore excursions at every port.

Where does cruise come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

Cruise comes from the Dutch verb kruisen, which literally meant 'to cross' and was used of a ship sailing back and forth across a stretch of sea, often while patrolling or hunting prizes. That Dutch verb was itself built on kruis, meaning 'cross', the same family that gives us 'cross' and 'crucial', both ultimately tracing back to Latin crux. English picked the word up in the seventeenth century, when Dutch seafaring dominated the North Sea trade, and the nautical sense of moving steadily over open water stuck. Over time the idea softened from naval patrolling into the pleasant notion of a sea voyage taken for leisure, and later still it spread to cars, aircraft, and anything moving at an easy, sustained pace. The spelling preserves its Dutch-flavoured 'ui' as 'ui'-turned-'ui', though English settled on -uise, which is exactly why it is so easily confused with its homophone 'crews'.

How the word is built

• cruise (from Dutch kruisen: to cross, to sail to and fro)
• silent -e