Nautical

How to spell nautical

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce nautical

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nautical mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to ships, sailors, or navigation at sea.

Nautical in a sentence

• The museum displays old nautical instruments used for navigation.

• Distances at sea are measured in nautical miles rather than kilometres.

Where does nautical come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the ancient Greek nautikos, meaning 'belonging to ships or sailors', which was built on nautes, the word for a sailor, itself derived from naus, meaning 'ship'. The Romans borrowed it as the Latin nauticus, and it passed into English through French and Latin during the 1500s. The same naus root sails on inside several familiar relatives: 'astronaut' literally means a star sailor, 'navy' shares the same seafaring ancestry, and even 'nausea' comes from it, because nausea originally meant the seasickness one felt aboard a tossing ship. The tricky part for spellers is the opening 'nau', which sounds like a plain 'naw' but keeps the Greek and Latin 'au' vowel, a clue worth remembering if you recall its sea-going cousins.

How the word is built

• naut- (from Greek nautes: sailor)
• -ic (relating to)
• -al (adjective suffix)