Frigate

How to spell frigate

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce frigate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does frigate mean?

1. nounA fast, medium-sized naval warship, typically used for escort and patrol duties.

Frigate in a sentence

• The navy deployed a frigate to shield the supply convoy.

• The museum displays a restored eighteenth-century frigate in its harbour dock.

Where does frigate come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word came into English in the late 1500s through French frégate, which itself was borrowed from Italian fregata, the name of a small, fast oar-and-sail ship used in the Mediterranean. The ultimate source of the Italian word is uncertain, and several proposed Latin roots have been suggested without firm agreement, so scholars treat its earliest origin as genuinely unclear. What is clear is the sense it carried: a swift, light vessel built for speed and patrol rather than heavy bombardment, and that idea of a nimble escort ship stayed with the word as it moved north into French and then English. Over the following centuries the frigate grew into a full naval class, a cruising warship lighter than a ship of the line, and the name was later borrowed again for a fast-flying seabird, the frigatebird. The single 'g' followed by '-ate' is the spelling trap, since the ending sounds like an unstressed schwa rather than the long 'ate' of words such as 'gate'.

How the word is built

• frigat- (from Italian fregata, a light warship)
• -e (anglicised ending)