Word.ws English Dictionary

crowd sail

crowd sail verb: to carry an unusual amount of sail in an attempt to accelerate the speed of a vessel.

Verb

crowd sail (third-person singular simple present crowds sail, present participle crowding sail, simple past and past participle crowded sail)

  1. (dated, idiomatic) To carry an unusual amount of sail in an attempt to accelerate the speed of a vessel.
    • the Spaniards busied themselves in making the most of a sudden favourable change of wind, and, without much regard to order, were crowding sail to get near the land.1827, William James, The Naval History of Great Britain […]

Forms of crowd sail

third-person singular presentcrowds sail
present participlecrowding sail
past participlecrowded sail
pastcrowded sail

Questions about crowd sail

What does crowd sail mean?
Crowd sail means to carry an unusual amount of sail in an attempt to accelerate the speed of a vessel.
What part of speech is crowd sail?
Crowd sail is a verb.
What is the past tense of crowd sail?
The past tense of crowd sail is crowded sail.

Words near crowd sail in the dictionary

  1. crowd pleaser
  2. crowd pleasers
  3. crowd psychology
  4. crowd puller
  5. crowd pullers
  6. crowd sail
  7. crowd surf
  8. crowd surfer
  9. crowd surfers
  10. crowd surfing
  11. crowd together

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crowd sail (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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Cite this entry: “crowd sail.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crowd_sail. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.