fore-and-aft topsail

1. 1.

   a triangular fore-and-aft sail with its foot along the gaff and its luff on the topmast

   Synonymsgaff topsail

   Broaderfore-and-aft sail

Questions about fore-and-aft topsail

What does fore-and-aft topsail mean?

fore-and-aft topsail means "a triangular fore-and-aft sail with its foot along the gaff and its luff on the topmast".

What is another word for fore-and-aft topsail?

Close synonyms include gaff topsail. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is fore-and-aft topsail a common word?

fore-and-aft topsail 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.