Pirate Slang Dictionary

Ship and crew roles

These were real jobs with defined responsibilities, and pirate vessels used most of the same structure as merchant and naval ships. The notable difference is how much power the quartermaster held.

• Quartermaster: elected officer who typically controlled distribution of plunder and day-to-day discipline. On many pirate ships his authority rivalled the captain's outside of battle.
• Bosun, from boatswain: responsible for the hull, rigging, sails and anchors, and for the crew working them.
• Master gunner: in charge of the cannon, powder and shot.
• Sailing master: responsible for navigation and the actual handling of the ship.
• Powder monkey: a boy who carried gunpowder from the magazine to the guns during action.
• Swab, or swabbie: a crew member assigned to washing the decks. Used as an insult.
• Landlubber: someone inexperienced at sea. Lubber is the older word, meaning a clumsy or idle person.
• Press-ganged: taken into naval service by force, a genuine and widely feared practice.

Parts of the ship

Shipboard vocabulary is precise, and using it correctly is the fastest way to make a scene feel real. Using it incorrectly is the fastest way to lose a reader who sails.

• Bow: the front of the ship. Stern: the back.
• Port: the left side facing forward. Starboard: the right side facing forward.
• Bilge: the lowest inner part of the hull, where water collects. Bilge water was foul, which is why bilge became a word for nonsense.
• Forecastle, pronounced foc'sle: the raised deck at the bow, and often the crew's quarters.
• Quarterdeck: the raised deck toward the stern, where the officers commanded.
• Hold: the cargo space below deck.
• Crow's nest: lookout platform high on a mast.
• Gunwale, pronounced gunnel: the upper edge of the ship's side.
• Keel: the structural spine running along the bottom of the hull.
• Rudder: the steering surface at the stern.

Sailing and navigation terms

These are working terms, still in use today, and they carry the most authenticity per word of anything on this page.

• Weigh anchor: raise the anchor to get under way. Not way anchor.
• Make sail: set the sails and begin moving.
• Come about: turn the ship through the wind onto the other tack.
• Heave to: stop the ship's forward progress while remaining under sail.
• Run aground: strike the bottom in shallow water, which is what happened to Queen Anne's Revenge.
• Leeward, pronounced loo-ard: the side away from the wind. Windward: the side the wind is coming from.
• Adrift: floating without control or propulsion.
• Fathom: a unit of water depth equal to six feet.
• Knot: one nautical mile per hour, measured historically by counting knots on a line paid out over the stern.
• Dead reckoning: estimating position from known speed, heading and elapsed time rather than from observation.
• Careen: deliberately beach a ship on her side to clean and repair the hull below the waterline. Essential maintenance and a moment of extreme vulnerability.

Plunder and articles

Pirate crews operated under written agreements. The vocabulary around money and rules is genuinely period and is far more interesting than the stereotype suggests.

• Articles: the written agreement a crew signed, covering shares, conduct and compensation. Signing the articles was the formal act of joining.
• Share: a crew member's portion of plunder. Officers took multiple shares, ordinary hands took one.
• Booty and plunder: captured goods.
• Prize: a captured vessel.
• Letter of marque: a government commission authorising attacks on enemy shipping, which made the holder a privateer rather than a pirate. The line between the two was thin and frequently crossed.
• No quarter: no mercy, no prisoners taken. Signalled by the red flag.
• Strike the colours: lower your flag as a formal surrender.
• Marooned: deliberately abandoned on an isolated shore. A punishment specified in some articles.
• Buccaneer: originally hunters on Hispaniola who smoked meat on a boucan, later applied to Caribbean raiders.
• Privateer: a private ship licensed by a government to attack enemy vessels in wartime.
• Corsair: a raider, used particularly of the Mediterranean and the Barbary coast.

Food, drink and daily life

Shipboard life was defined by what could be preserved. These terms all come from that constraint.

• Hardtack: a hard dry biscuit that kept for long periods. A staple, and frequently infested.
• Grog: rum diluted with water, introduced in the Royal Navy to reduce drunkenness while preserving the ration.
• Salmagundi: a mixed salad dish of whatever meat, fish, eggs and vegetables were aboard. Genuinely associated with pirate crews.
• Scurvy: disease caused by vitamin C deficiency, the most serious health problem on long voyages.
• Weevil: the beetle that infested ship's biscuit.
• Slush: fat skimmed from boiled salt meat. Sold by the cook, which is the origin of slush fund.
• Dog watch: a short two-hour watch used to rotate the watch schedule so the same men did not always draw the worst hours.

Phrases from film, not history

These are the terms most people associate with pirates, and most of them come from performance rather than the record. Robert Newton's West Country accent in the 1950 film Treasure Island is the single largest influence on how pirates are imagined to speak.

• Arr: not documented as pirate speech. It comes from West Country English as performed on screen.
• Shiver me timbers: appears in nineteenth century fiction, not in pirate testimony. It is literary rather than historical.
• Walk the plank: extremely rare in the historical record. Marooning was the real punishment. Plank walking is largely a nineteenth century invention.
• Ahoy: genuinely nautical and old, though not distinctively piratical.
• Avast: real, from Dutch, meaning hold or stop.
• Matey and me hearties: real words, though the concentrated pirate delivery is theatrical.
• X marks the spot: buried treasure maps are almost entirely fictional. Pirates generally spent their plunder rather than burying it.

Sources and a caution

The terms above are drawn from standard nautical dictionaries, published maritime histories and court records of the period. Where a phrase's origin is genuinely uncertain, this page says so rather than picking the most entertaining explanation.

One caution worth stating plainly. A great deal of pirate slang circulating online is invented, and it spreads because it sounds right. If a phrase appears only on themed word lists and never in a nautical dictionary or a court transcript, treat it as decoration rather than evidence.