close to the wind

1. 1.

   nearly opposite to the direction from which wind is coming

   “sailing close to the wind”

   seafaring

Questions about close to the wind

What does close to the wind mean?

close to the wind means "nearly opposite to the direction from which wind is coming".

Is close to the wind a common word?

close to the wind is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.