Yacht

How to spell yacht

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce yacht

What does yacht mean?

1. nounA medium to large sailing or motor vessel used for cruising, racing, or leisure.

Yacht in a sentence

• The millionaire moored his yacht in the harbour for the summer.

• They spent the weekend repairing the sails on the yacht.

Where does yacht come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

This word came into English in the late 1500s from the Dutch word jacht, which was itself a shortening of jachtschip, literally a 'hunting ship' or 'chase ship', built from jagen meaning 'to hunt or chase' and schip meaning 'ship'. The Dutch originally used these light, fast vessels to pursue pirates and smugglers along their coast, so the name captured the idea of a swift chaser rather than a leisure craft. When the Dutch presented one such vessel to the returning King Charles II in 1660, the English took up both the boat and the word, and the sense gradually softened into the pleasure and racing vessel we know today. The strange spelling, with its silent 'ch' cluster, is a direct fossil of the Dutch original and is exactly what makes the word a notorious trap: the sound is simply 'yot', but the letters preserve a piece of seventeenth-century Dutch. Modern Dutch still spells the word jacht, a close relative that explains why English ended up with the unexpected 'cht'.

How the word is built

• yacht (from Dutch jacht, short for jachtschip: hunting/chasing ship)