yacht
/jɑt/noun, verb
yacht is a noun meaning “A slick and light ship for making pleasure trips or racing on water, having sails but often motor-powered. At times used as a residence offshore on a…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled Y-A-C-H-T and has one syllable, and it appears 6.6 times per million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of yacht is yachts.
What does yacht mean?
noun
- 1
A slick and light ship for making pleasure trips or racing on water, having sails but often motor-powered. At times used as a residence offshore on a dock.
Would you like to go sailing on my uncle’s yacht?
- 2
Any vessel used for private, noncommercial purposes.
verb
- 1
To sail, voyage, or race in a yacht.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce yacht?
- UK /jɒt/
- US /jɑt/
Yacht has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-yacht.wav, En-us-yacht.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of yacht
- yachts plural, present, singular, he/she/it
- yachting participle, present
- yachted participle, past
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is yacht?
Yacht appears 6.6 times per million words in written English, the 9,313th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Yacht in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does yacht come from?
Circa 1557; variant of yaught, earlier yeaghe (“light, fast-sailing ship”), from Dutch jacht (“yacht; hunt”), in older spelling jaght(e), short for jaghtschip (“light sailing vessel, fast pirate ship”, literally “pursuit ship”), compound of jacht and schip (“ship”). In the 16th century the Dutch built light, fast ships to chase the ships of pirates and smugglers from the coast.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).