Windjammer

A New England windjammer—the Luther Little, a four-masted schooner—just after its construction in 1917

The word "windjammer" has a variety of associations, both nautical and not. In the late 19th century the term was pejorative, as used by sailors aboard steamships.[4]

• In 1892, Rudder Magazine said in a story, "The deck hands on the liners contemptuously refer to [sailing vessels] as 'wind-jammers'."[4]
• In 1917, the American Dialect Society recorded residents of the U.S. state of Maine referring to fore-and-aft sailing vessels as "windjammers" in a list of regional word usages.[5]
• The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea calls windjammer "a non-nautical name by which square-rigged sailing ships are sometimes known".[6]
• The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.S. Military calls windjammer "a merchant sailing ship".[7]
• The following languages have adopted "windjammer" as a loanword from English in reference to sailing ships:
  • Czech: windjammer[8]
  • Dutch: windjammer[9]
  • German: Windjammer[10][11]
  • Japanese: ウィンドジャマー[12]
  • Polish: windjammer[13]
  • Russian: винджаммер[14]
  • Serbo-Croatian: виндјамер or vindjamer[15]
  • Ukrainian: вінджамер

• Green's Dictionary of Slang has a variety of non-nautical definitions for the term.[16]

Windjammers

Full-rigged ship

Barque

Barquentine

Schooner

Showing three-masted examples, progressing from square sails on each to all fore-and-aft sails on each.

Any of the following ships may be called a "windjammer":

• Barque[7]
• Barquentine[7]
• Brig[6][7]
• Brigantine[7]
• Clipper ship[7][17]
• Full-rigged ship[6][7]
• Iron-hulled sailing ship[7][18][19]
• Sail-powered cruise ship[20][21]
• Schooner[7][5]

Windjammers have figured prominently in both historical and fictional literature. Some examples include:

• Allen, Oliver E.; Books, Time-Life (1978). The Windjammers. Time-Life Books. ISBN 9780705406253. Allen, Oliver E. 1978. The Windjammers. Amsterdam: Time-Life Books.
• Lubbock, Basil (1953). The Last of the Windjammers. Brown, Son & Ferguson.
• Noppen, Ryan K. (2015). German Commerce Raiders 1914–18. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781472809513.
• Richardson, V. A. (2006). The House of Windjammer. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. ISBN 9781582349848.
• Runciman, Walter Sr. (1902). Windjammers and Sea Tramps. London: At the Unicorn.
• Simpson, Paul W. (2017). Windjammer. Lulu Press, Inc. ISBN 9780244305727.
• Thomas, Lowell (2013). The Sea Devil - The Story Of Count Felix Von Luckner, The German War Raider. Read Books Ltd. ISBN 9781446548196.