carrack

Alternative forms

• carack, carrick

Etymology

From French caraque (compare Spanish and Portuguese carraca, Italian caracca), from Latin carraca, from Latin carrus (“wagon”); or perhaps from Arabic قَرَاقِير (qarāqīr).

Noun

carrack (plural carracks)

1. (historical) A large European sailing vessel of the 14th to 17th centuries similar to a caravel but square-rigged on the foremast and mainmast and lateen-rigged on the mizzenmast.
   • c. 1597–1603 (date written), Thomas Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West. Or, A Girle Worth Gold. The First Part. […], London: […] [Miles Flesher] for Richard Royston, […], published 1631, →OCLC, Act I, page 1:

     They [the English] are all on fire / To purchaſe from the Spaniard. If their Carracks / Come deeply laden, vvee ſhall tugge vvith them / For golden ſpoile.

   • c. 1603–1604 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Othello, the Moore of Venice”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene ii]:

     Faith, he tonight hath boarded a land carrack; if it prove lawful prize, he's made for ever.

   • 1952, C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

     The name of the ship was Dawn Treader. She was only a little bit of a thing compared with one of our ships, or even with the cogs, dromonds, carracks and galleons which Narnia had owned when Lucy and Edmund had reigned there under Peter as the High King, for nearly all navigation had died out in the reigns of Caspian's ancestors.

   • 2018, David Birmingham, A Concise History of Portugal:

     Thereafter huge sailing carracks brought Indian pepper and cotton, Indonesian perfume and spice, Chinese silk and porcelain, to the royal trading house at Lisbon.