Word.ws English Dictionary

short-tack

short-tack verb: to tack several times in rapid succession when sailing upwind in a narrow waterway.

Verb

short-tack (third-person singular simple present short-tacks, present participle short-tacking, simple past and past participle short-tacked)

  1. To tack several times in rapid succession when sailing upwind in a narrow waterway.
    • I started short-tacking every hour down the coast, heading further offshore, as I knew I'd find better wind there.2010, Mike Perham, Sailing the Dream, page 143

Forms of short-tack

third-person singular presentshort-tacks
present participleshort-tacking
past participleshort-tacked
pastshort-tacked

Questions about short-tack

What does short-tack mean?
Short-tack means to tack several times in rapid succession when sailing upwind in a narrow waterway.
What part of speech is short-tack?
Short-tack is a verb.
What is the past tense of short-tack?
The past tense of short-tack is short-tacked.

Words near short-tack in the dictionary

  1. short-staffs
  2. short-stop
  3. short-stopped
  4. short-stopping
  5. short-stops
  6. short-tack
  7. short-tailed blue
  8. short-tailed blues
  9. short-tailed chinchilla
  10. short-tailed chinchillas
  11. short-tailed fox

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: short-tack (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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