Word of the Day

Did You Know?

In the heyday of large sailing ships, numerous nautical words appeared on the horizon. Yaw is one such word. Its origin isn't exactly known, but it began turning up in print in the 16th century, first as a noun meaning "movement off course" or "side to side movement," and then as a verb. For centuries, it remained a sailing word—often alongside pitch ("to have the front end rise and fall")—with occasional extended use as a synonym of the verb alternate. When the era of airplane flight dawned, much of the vocabulary of sailing found new life in aeronautics, and "yawing" was no longer confined to the sea. Nowadays yaw, pitch, and roll are just as likely to be used by pilots and rocket scientists to describe the motion of their crafts.