In sailing

Sailing

Sailing is the propulsion of a vehicle and the control of its movement with large foils called sails. By changing the rigging, rudder, and sometimes the keel or centre board, a sailor manages the force of the wind on the sails in order to move the boat relative to its surrounding medium and...

, a brigantine or hermaphrodite brig is a vessel with two masts, only the forward of which is square rig

Square rig

Square rig is a generic type of sail and rigging arrangement in which the primary driving sails are carried on horizontal spars which are perpendicular, or square, to the keel of the vessel and to the masts. These spars are called yards and their tips, beyond the last stay, are called the yardarms...

ged.

Origins of the term

Originally the brigantine was a small ship carrying both oars and sails. It was a favorite of Mediterranean pirates and its name comes from the Italian word brigantino, meaning brigand, and applied by extension to his ship. By the 17th century the term meant a two-masted ship. In the late 17th century, the Royal Navy

Royal Navy

The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...

 used the term brigantine to refer to small two-masted vessels designed to be rowed as well as sailed, rigged with square rigs on the front mast and fore-and-aft rigging on the main mast.

By the first half of the 18th century the word had evolved to refer not to a ship type name, but rather to a particular type of rigging: square rig

Square rig

Square rig is a generic type of sail and rigging arrangement in which the primary driving sails are carried on horizontal spars which are perpendicular, or square, to the keel of the vessel and to the masts. These spars are called yards and their tips, beyond the last stay, are called the yardarms...

ged on the foremast and fore-and-aft rigged on the mainmast.The 1780 Universal Dictionary of the Marine by William Falconer

William Falconer

William Falconer was a Scottish poet.Falconer was the son of a barber in Edinburgh, where he was born, became a sailor, and was thus thoroughly competent to describe the management of the storm-tossed vessel, the career and fate of which are described in his poem, The Shipwreck , a work of...

 defines a brig or brigantine as a merchant-ship with two masts The word "brig" is an 18th century shortening of the word brigantine, which came to mean a vessel square-rigged on both masts. The early Oxford English Dictionary

Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...

(with citations from 1720 to 1854) still defined brig as being either identical to a brigantine, or alternatively, a vessel of similar sail plan to a modern brig. By the middle of the 19th century modern meanings had more or less stabilised, although purists continue to debate the exact differences, or lack of them, between brig, brigantine and hermaphrodite brig in both English and American usage.

Modern brigantine rig

In modern parlance, a brigantine is a principally fore-and-aft rig with a square rigged foremast, as opposed to a brig

Brig

A brig is a sailing vessel with two square-rigged masts. During the Age of Sail, brigs were seen as fast and manoeuvrable and were used as both naval warships and merchant vessels. They were especially popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries...

which is square rigged on both masts. American usage sometimes uses hermaphrodite brig as a synonym for brigantine.