catamaran
Pluralcatamarans
- 1A boat or ship built with two parallel hulls joined together.
The catamaran sliced through the waves at remarkable speed.
Modern racing catamarans can lift one hull clear of the water.
Note
The name is older than the design it now calls to mind. It comes from Tamil kaṭṭumaram, from kaṭṭu "to tie" and maram "tree, wood", so it literally means tied wood. That fits the lashed-log raft better than a modern yacht. Letitia Elizabeth Landon's 1838 scene off Madras, where an Indian springs from "his catamaran" to a ship's side, stays close to that origin.
- 2A raft of three pieces of wood lashed together, the central piece longer than the rest, serving as a keel on which the paddler squats while rowing.
Note
Here the word still matches its Tamil sense of tied wood. William Hickey's Memoirs of a Georgian Rake describes "strange-looking things" he understood were called catamarans: nothing more than two or three large tree trunks strongly lashed together, with men sitting on them. The number of logs varies in descriptions. The word is obsolete in this sense, so in modern prose "log raft" says it without confusion.
- 3An old kind of fireship: a boat loaded with combustibles and floated into an enemy fleet to set it ablaze.
Note
A naval word for a fireship that has dropped out of use entirely. It is easy to misread in old accounts of warfare at sea. A catamaran sent toward an enemy fleet is a fireship, not a raft or a twin-hulled vessel. Details of fire, drifting or ships at anchor usually tell you which meaning is meant. In modern writing, fireship is the word to use.
Less common meaning
- 4A bad-tempered, quarrelsome woman who is given to scolding and nagging.
The landlady was a notorious catamaran, berating her tenants over the smallest fault.
She meddles with my prescriptions for your wife; she doctors the infant in private: you'll never have a quiet house or a quiet wife as long as that old Catamaran is here.
1889, William Makepeace Thackeray, Hobson's ChoiceNote
An insult from household quarrels that has long gone out of use and was rare even in its day. In Thackeray's Hobson's Choice, a character complains there will be no quiet house "as long as that old Catamaran is here": a woman who meddles with prescriptions and doctors the infant in private. Used now, most readers will picture the twin-hulled boat unless the setting makes the scold plain.
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Origin
From Tamil கட்டுமரம் (kaṭṭumaram), a compound of கட்டு (kaṭṭu, "to tie") and மரம் (maram, "tree, wood").