Dictionary

sailer en · NOUN

Etymology

From Middle English sailer, sayler, saylere, equivalent to sail + -er.

Meanings

1. That which sails; a sailboat.
   • These vessels are handsome to look at, good sailers, and admirable sea-boats, and will make long voyages with perfect safety, traversing the whole Archipelago from New Guinea to Singapore in seas which, as every one who has sailed much in them can testify, are not so smooth and tempest-free as word-painting travellers love to represent them. 1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 184:
   • She is the best sailer in the service, and she carries a hundred guns. 1880, Thomas Hardy, chapter 34, in The Trumpet-Major:
   • Elsewhere it has been said that in the lack of frigates (of course better sailers than line-of-battle ships) in the English squadron up the Straits at that period, the Indomitable was occasionally employed not only as an available substitute for a scout, but at times on detached service of more important kind. 1924, Herman Melville, chapter 16, in Billy Budd, London: Constable & Co.:
   • The Gulnare was a fast sailer, built for a slaver originally[.] 1887, Mrs. Dominic D. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 14:
2. A fastball that skims through the air.
3. A butterfly of the genus Neptis
4. (alt-of, obsolete) Obsolete form of sailor.
   alt of sailor
   • The records of Stepney parish note the burial of Henry Rainsford "an old sailer sometyme beadle of Ratclife and now a pencioner." 2002, Cheryl A. Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men:

Forms

Deriveds

daysailer · trailer sailer · motorsailer