After-sail

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    One of the sails towards the aft, i.e. on the mizzenmast, or on the stays between the mainmast and mizzenmast.

    "On this final leg home, these experiments were taken a step further by putting an extra-large sail on the after mast, increasing sail area and changing the balance of the rig in that the after sail was then larger than the forward sail."

Example

More examples

"On this final leg home, these experiments were taken a step further by putting an extra-large sail on the after mast, increasing sail area and changing the balance of the rig in that the after sail was then larger than the forward sail."

Etymology

From after + sail.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.