Word.ws English Dictionary

crosstree

crosstree noun: a timber or metal beam fixed athwartships part way up a mast to spread the rigging.

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
    • She was wearing the Red Ensign at her cross-trees and the Stars and Stripes aft and she was making about three knots through the twenty-foot opening of the reef.1954, Ian Fleming, “Beau Desert”, in Live and Let Die, London: Pan Books, published 1957, page 197

Forms of crosstree

pluralcrosstrees
alternative formcross-tree

Origin of crosstree

From cross + tree.

Questions about crosstree

What does crosstree mean?
Crosstree means a timber or metal beam fixed athwartships part way up a mast to spread the rigging.
What part of speech is crosstree?
Crosstree is a noun.
What is the plural of crosstree?
The plural of crosstree is crosstrees.

Words near crosstree in the dictionary

  1. crosstrackings
  2. crosstracks
  3. crosstrainer
  4. crosstrainers
  5. crosstraining
  6. crosstree
  7. crosstrees
  8. crossunder
  9. crossunders
  10. crossvalidate
  11. crossvalidated

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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.

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