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0 points79523y ago0 comments

I wonder how the craft word was adapted to mean the boat object.

I think for river travel it was common to build a boat/raft to make a journey and then break it up at the destination. In that context maybe the object of the boat was secondary to the act of making the boat. And at some point boats became more personified and thought of as things in their own right.

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rawling3y ago

A couple other suggestions, although still not certain:

> Use for "small boat" is first recorded 1670s, probably from a phrase similar to "vessels of small craft" and referring either to the trade they did or the seamanship they required, or perhaps it preserves the word in its original sense of "power."

https://www.etymonline.com/word/craft?ref=etymonline_crossre...

I'd never even though about this, so thanks for that.

tankenmate3y ago

I suspect it was a shortening of watercraft. According to wiktionary the use of the word for water vessels was originally used for smaller loading craft. So using the older Germanic meaning of "by means of", the phrase "it got here by watercraft" could be translated as "it got here by means of water". One could assume that it wouldn't take much for the word to go from preposition to noun; especially in the context of agglutinates and abbreviations.

The English word "boat" comes directly from German; "das Boot".

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