Sail

How to spell sail

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sail

What does sail mean?

1. nounA sheet of fabric spread to catch the wind and propel a boat or ship.
2. verbTo travel across water in a boat or ship, especially using the wind.

Sail in a sentence

• noun

  The storm tore a hole in the main sail of the yacht.

• verb

  They plan to sail across the channel next summer.

• noun

  The crew hoisted the sail as the wind picked up.

• verb

  The ferry will sail from the harbour at dawn.

Where does sail come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English segl, which named the sheet of fabric spread to catch the wind and drive a ship forward. It belongs to a wide family of Germanic relatives, including the Dutch zeil and the German Segel, all pointing back to a common ancestor for the same piece of equipment. Some scholars have suggested the root originally meant a cut piece of cloth, which fits the idea of a sail as a worked sheet of canvas. From the physical object the verb sense grew naturally: to travel across water under sail, and later simply to move smoothly and easily, as in to sail through an exam. The spelling trap is purely auditory, since sail sounds identical to sale, the offering of goods at a price, yet the two have entirely separate origins and the boating word keeps the -ai- of its old cloth meaning.

How the word is built

• sail (from Old English segl, a sheet of cloth that catches the wind)

Words that sound like sail

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• sale: The exchange of goods or property for money.