Word.ws English Dictionary

cross-tree

cross-tree is the alternative spelling of crosstree.

Meaning of crosstree

Noun

crosstree (plural crosstrees)

  1. (in plural) A timber or metal beam fixed athwartships part way up a mast to spread the rigging.
    • Your most usual point of perch is the head of the t’ gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t’ gallant crosstrees.1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “chapter 35”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC

Forms of cross-tree

pluralcross-trees

Questions about cross-tree

What is cross-tree the alternative spelling of?
Cross-tree is the alternative spelling of crosstree.

Words near cross-tree in the dictionary

  1. cross-transmission
  2. cross-transmit
  3. cross-transmits
  4. cross-transmitted
  5. cross-transmitting
  6. cross-tree
  7. cross-trees
  8. cross-tune
  9. cross-tuned
  10. cross-tunes
  11. cross-tuning

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cross-tree (page history and authors); crosstree (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “cross-tree.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cross-tree. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.