Word.ws English Dictionary

shoulder-of-mutton sail

shoulder-of-mutton sail noun: a triangular sail attached to the top of a boat's mast. It may also attach to a boom.

shoulder-of-mutton sail: a triangular sail attached to the top of a boat's mast. It may also attach to a boom
Image: David Steel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

shoulder-of-mutton sail (plural shoulder-of-mutton sails)

  1. A triangular sail attached to the top of a boat's mast. It may also attach to a boom.
    • Now I wished for my boy Xury, and the long-boat with shoulder-of-mutton sail, with which I sailed above a thousand miles on the coast of Africa1719 May 6 (Gregorian calendar), [Daniel Defoe], The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, […], London: […] W[illiam] Taylor […], →OCLC
    • a long galley with three masts, each dressed with a single cross-spar for carrying a leg-of-mutton sail, and on the shore a couple of ship's boats with a company of men waiting to transport our goods and us aboard.1895, Frank Barrett, A Set of Rogues

Forms of shoulder-of-mutton sail

pluralshoulder-of-mutton sails

Origin of shoulder-of-mutton sail

From its shape.

Questions about shoulder-of-mutton sail

What does shoulder-of-mutton sail mean?
Shoulder-of-mutton sail means a triangular sail attached to the top of a boat's mast. It may also attach to a boom.
What part of speech is shoulder-of-mutton sail?
Shoulder-of-mutton sail is a noun.
What is the plural of shoulder-of-mutton sail?
The plural of shoulder-of-mutton sail is shoulder-of-mutton sails.

Words near shoulder-of-mutton sail in the dictionary

  1. shoulder-blade
  2. shoulder-blades
  3. shoulder-knot
  4. shoulder-knots
  5. shoulder-length
  6. shoulder-of-mutton sail
  7. shoulder-of-mutton sails
  8. shoulder-pole
  9. shoulder-poles
  10. shoulder-strap
  11. shoulder-straps

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shoulder-of-mutton 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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “shoulder-of-mutton sail.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shoulder-of-mutton_sail. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.