West Indiaman
West Indiaman noun: a merchant vessel trading between Europe and the West Indies (including the Americas), generally smaller than the similar East Indiamen.
Noun
West Indiaman (uncountable)
- A merchant vessel trading between Europe and the West Indies (including the Americas), generally smaller than the similar East Indiamen.
- In Joshua Kelly's Treatise on Navigation, of the former date [1757], an instance is related of a West Indiaman drifted, during two days of dead calm, forty-six miles northward, across the mouth of the British Channel.1815, James Rennell, “Some Farther Observations on the Current That Often Prevails to the Westward of the Scilly Islands”, in Abstracts of the Papers Printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the...
- [P]iloted down the Thames, drifting with the tides along that central highway of trade, she floated past West Indiamen loaded with sugar and rum from the Caribbean[.])2023, David Grann, chapter 1, in The Wager, Doubleday
Forms of West Indiaman
| alternative form | West-Indiaman |
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Origin of West Indiaman
From West Indies + -man.
Questions about West Indiaman
- What does West Indiaman mean?
- West Indiaman means a merchant vessel trading between Europe and the West Indies (including the Americas), generally smaller than the similar East Indiamen.
- What part of speech is West Indiaman?
- West Indiaman is a noun.
Words near West Indiaman in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: West Indiaman (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: “West Indiaman.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/west_indiaman. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.