dhow

A vibrant stylized painting of a dhow with a lateen sail sailing towards a sunset.
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A vibrant stylized painting of a dhow with a lateen sail sailing towards a sunset.

This image uses a stylized depiction of a dhow with a lateen sail against a backdrop of a sunset. The sunset evokes a sense of the exotic Arabian coasts where dhows are traditionally found, making the image memorable and easy to connect with the word's meaning.

  1. noun — dhows
    1. A traditional sailing vessel used along the coasts of Arabia, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean, generally having a single mast and a lateen sail.
      • Joshua continued preparing breakfast, Bijan returned to piloting the dhow offshore and Pourghasem returned to his watch.[…]Several dhows were on the water and some fishermen were already at work.
      • The navy sometimes hired dhows for its patrols.[…]If a dhow was stopped, the slaves could not be counted on to make their presence known, having probably been told that the Europeans would kill them.
      • They took a dhow from Mombasa bound for Aden and planned to take a larger vessel to Suez and then overland to Cairo.
      • In contemporary Anglophone usage, the term ‘dhow’ has come to refer generically and exonymically to traditional wooden vessels of the western Indian Ocean, whatever their particular forms or emic classification.