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Examples of 'yacht' in a sentence

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Definition of yacht

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Definition of yacht  (Entry 2 of 2)

intransitive verb

Examples of yacht in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'yacht.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

obsolete Dutch jaght , from Middle Low German jacht , short for jachtschip , literally, hunting ship

1557, in the meaning defined above

1836, in the meaning defined above

Phrases Containing yacht

Articles related to yacht.

Why does English have so many silent...

Why does English have so many silent letters?

Inexplicable silent letters, explained

Words of the Week - March 4

The words that defined the week ending March 4th, 2022

Dictionary Entries Near yacht

yacht chair

Cite this Entry

“Yacht.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/yacht. Accessed 31 Mar. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of yacht.

Kids Definition of yacht  (Entry 2 of 2)

from obsolete Dutch jaght (now jacht ), short for jachtschip, literally, "hunting ship"

More from Merriam-Webster on yacht

Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for yacht

Nglish: Translation of yacht for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of yacht for Arabic Speakers

Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about yacht

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a vessel used for private cruising, racing, or other noncommercial purposes.

to sail, voyage, or race in a yacht.

Origin of yacht

Other words from yacht.

• yachty, adjective
• su·per·yacht, noun

Words that may be confused with yacht

• barge , boat , canoe , cruise ship , sailboat , ship , yacht

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024

How to use yacht in a sentence

He and I yachted together before I lost my money, and he gave me this chance.

It turned my mind towards Egypt, which I have never seen, although I've yachted all over the place.

There were so many sets—those who yachted, danced, and golfed; those who danced and golfed; and those who merely golfed.

British Dictionary definitions for yacht

/ ( jɒt ) /

a vessel propelled by sail or power, used esp for pleasure cruising, racing, etc

short for sand yacht , ice yacht

(intr) to sail or cruise in a yacht

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

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Erin Wright Writing

Writing-Related Software Tutorials

How to Write the Names of Ships and Boats

By Erin Wright

We’ll begin by looking at the guidelines for writing ship and boat names without abbreviations and then with abbreviations.

We’ll conclude with a discussion on whether we should use gendered or gender-neutral pronouns for ships and boats.

Ship and Boat Names without Abbreviations

Ship and boat names that don’t start with abbreviations are capitalized and italicized in their entirety. 2

Draken Harald Hårfagre is the world’s largest Viking ship currently sailing.

The criminals escaped on the stolen yacht, fatefully named Found Money .

Important Note: Those who follow The Associated Press Stylebook or the U.S. Navy Style Guide should see the Style Guide Alert at the bottom of this post for an alternative recommendation.

Ship and Boat Names with Abbreviations

Abbreviations before ship and boat names, such as USS (United States Ship), SS (steamship or sailing ship), or HMS (Her [or His] Majesty’s Ship), should not be italicized. However, the rest of the name should be capitalized and italicized. 3

The freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior in 1975.

Nancy Reagan christened USS Ronald Reagan in 2001.

The Wikipedia article “ Ship Prefixes ” offers an extensive list of additional watercraft abbreviations from around the world.

Periods don’t appear between the abbreviated letters. See “ How to Abbreviate United States ” for information on abbreviating the country’s name in general writing.

Important Note: Those who follow the U.S. Navy Style Guide should see the Style Guide Alert at the bottom of this post for information on using the word the before ship and boat names.

Pronouns for Ships and Boats

Historically, ships and boats have been referred to with female pronouns. 4 This writing style has fallen out of favor and, today, the gender-neutral pronoun it is recommended for all watercraft. 5

Despite this update, I encourage historical authors to research pronoun usage in the time period they are writing about because historically accurate pronouns in dialog can create and maintain authenticity.

Style Guide Alert

The Associated Press Stylebook (AP style) doesn’t recommend italicizing any words, including the names of boats or ships. 6

The U.S. Navy Style Guide , which follows most AP style recommendations, doesn’t recommend italicizing the names of ships or boats, either. 7 Government writers and editors should note that this conflicts with the U.S. Government Publishing Office Manual , which does recommend italics. 8

In addition, the U.S. Navy Style Guide says that the word the shouldn’t be used directly before abbreviations such as USS or HMS. 9

Further Reading: When Should You Capitalize Oceans, Mountains, Lakes, and Other Geographic Features?

1. Encyclopedia Britannica , s.v. “History of Ships,” https://www.britannica.com/technology/ship/History-of-ships .

2. The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 8.116; “How do I format the name of a ship in MLA style?” Ask the MLA, The MLA Style Center, https://style.mla.org/format-the-name-of-a-ship/ .

3. The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 8.116; “How do I format the name of a ship in MLA style?” Ask the MLA, The MLA Style Center, https://style.mla.org/format-the-name-of-a-ship/.

4. The Gregg Reference Manual, 11th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011), 326.

5. The Associated Press Stylebook 2020–2022 (New York: Associated Press, 2020), 37; The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 8.116; “How do I format the name of a ship in MLA style?” Ask the MLA, The MLA Style Center, https://style.mla.org/format-the-name-of-a-ship/.

6. The Associated Press Stylebook 2020–2022 (New York: Associated Press, 2020), 37, 161.

7. U.S. Navy Style Guide , s.v. “ship names,” accessed November 14, 2018, https://www.navy.mil/submit/navyStyleGuide.pdf .

8. U.S. Government Publishing Office Style Manual (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2016), 11.6. https://www.govinfo.gov/gpo-style-manual .

9. U.S. Navy Style Guide , s.v. “ship names,” https://www.navy.mil/submit/navyStyleGuide.pdf.

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Examples of boat

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something that is very unpleasant but must be accepted

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An Expert Guide to Writing Effective Compound Sentences (+ Examples)

Table of contents

Laura Jane Bradbury

Compound sentences consist of two or more sentences that have been joined together with a word such as “and” or “but.” As a copywriter of seven years, I’ve learned how they can greatly enhance the clarity and flow of your writing.

But using them incorrectly can have the opposite effect of confusing and frustrating your reader. The good news is that once you understand the basic rules on how to structure them, including how to use commas and semicolons, they’ll become second nature.

In this guide, I explain what compound sentences are, how they can improve your writing, and how to use them to give your writing maximum impact.

Key Takeaways

• Compound sentences consist of two or more sentences — or “independent clauses” — connected using coordinating conjunctions, such as "or” and “but.”
• You can use a semicolon between the individual clauses instead of a conjunction.
• These types of sentences can make your writing flow better and express ideas more concisely.
• You should always use a comma before a coordinating conjunction.

What’s a compound sentence?

Compound sentences join two or more independent clauses together using a coordinating conjunction or semicolon.

Here's a quick dictionary guide to the terminology:

How to use compound sentences correctly

There are two punctuation rules to follow:

• You must place a comma before a coordinating conjunction —"I poured myself a glass of water , for I was thirsty."
• Always add a semicolon between the clauses if there's no coordinating conjunction. Don’t use a comma to join them, as this is grammatically incorrect and known as a “run-on sentence.”

While punctuation is important, there are other things to consider when you're editing compound sentences, as we explore below.

Does each independent clause contribute to the overall meaning?

Scan through your paragraphs and ask yourself if each independent clause is meaningful. Look for repetition or clauses that reiterate similar points.

Example: "Climate change is a crucial issue that needs action, but not enough people are addressing the problem."

In this sentence, there's no need to include two clauses since they both tell the reader that climate change needs more attention. It’s more concise to write, "Climate change is a crucial issue that people need to address."

The Wordtune Editor spots grammar mistakes and highlights opportunities to improve readability. To avoid lengthy and dull compound sentences, use the Editor for recommendations.

In the example below, I typed my sentence and waited for Wordtune's suggestions to appear. As you can see, it highlighted ways to make my sentence more concise, such as removing unnecessary words. For instance, it suggested I edit “or it can lead” into “or lead”.

Get Wordtune for free > Get Wordtune for free >

Are the clauses complete?

Be careful not to combine two clauses if one doesn't make a complete sentence. 

" Getting hair cut, but I need to be back in time for my virtual meeting."

“Getting hair cut” isn’t a complete sentence because it lacks a subject. "I'm getting my hair cut" would make it complete. If you're ever in doubt, type your clause into Wordtune. The Editor will highlight in red if your clause is incorrect.

Examples of compound sentences

To help you understand compound sentences, I’ve created a color code to highlight where the conjunction, verbs, and subjects are in each sentence.

Red = conjunction

Blue = verb

Purple = subject

Most of the attendees are about to finish the book, but Lucy has another chapter to read .

Why it works: “Most of the attendees are about to finish the book” and “Lucy has another chapter to read” are both individual sentences. Using the conjunction “but,” they can be combined into a single sentence.

The sentence also contains two subjects—“attendees” and “Lucy”—as well as two verbs—“finishing” and “read.”

Hamza   frequently exercises at the gym, so he can build more muscle. 

‍ Tip: If your sentence focuses on the same subject, ensure you include the subject twice. In this case, I used “Hamza” and “he.”

Claire doesn’t drink milk in her coffee, nor does she take sugar.

Tip: When using "nor," make sure the first part of your clause is negative. For example, “Claire doesn’t” is negative. If I said, “Claire drinks milk in her coffee, nor does she take sugar”, the sentence wouldn’t make grammatical sense.

I’m riding my bike today ; Craig chose to walk.

Why it works: The semicolon goes between the two independent clauses, just like a conjunction. Remember not to include a comma when using a semicolon.

What are the benefits of using compound sentences?

Compound sentences are useful in several ways.

They fix run-on sentences

Run-on sentences have more than one independent clause without a comma and coordinating conjunction to separate them. They’re grammatically incorrect and difficult to read and understand, so fixing them is important.

Example of a run-on sentence:

‍ "I love creating content on Instagram, I also use TikTok for content creation. "

Notice how this sentence flows poorly because the two clauses are not connected. By adding a conjunction, you can make the two clauses into a compound sentence.

How to fix it with a compound sentence:

" I love creating content on Instagram, but I also use TikTok for content creation. "

Tip: Read our guide on fixing run-on sentences for more examples.

They can make your writing flow better

A mix of simple and compound sentences adds variety to your writing and creates a more engaging flow.

"I've been up since 5am writing my essay. I can finish it before meeting my friends. We're off to the park to enjoy the sun."

“I've been up since 5am writing my essay so I can finish it before meeting my friends. We're off to the park to enjoy the sun."

In the second example, the use of the coordinating conjunction "so" makes it easier for the reader to understand why the writer woke up early. The second example also sounds better because it contains a compound sentence followed by a simple one. Too many simple sentences together can interrupt the reader's flow.

Expresses complex ideas concisely

This is particularly significant if you're writing about a difficult technical subject. By combining ideas in a single sentence, you can get your point across faster than using multiple sentences. 

But be careful not to join too many clauses and ideas, as very long sentences are also difficult to follow. A good rule of thumb is to join no more than two clauses. 

"The study was conducted to analyze the effects of exercise on cardiovascular health, yet the results on the participants were inconclusive."

Notice how this example explains the purpose of the study and the outcome all in one succinct sentence. 

Conclusion 

Understanding compound sentence rules can take time, but with practice, you'll be able to identify them in no time. They add variety to your writing and can help convey complex thoughts.

Remember to double-check that each clause is a sentence on its own before connecting them. Ask yourself, does it contain a verb and a subject?

For more tips on improving your writing skills, read our guide on how to write concisely and check out our favorite methods to improve your vocabulary . 

How often should you use compound sentences in your writing?

While compound sentences can improve readability, overusing them can make your writing harder to read. Remember to include varied sentence lengths with a mix of compound and simple sentences.

What is the difference between a compound sentence and a simple sentence?

A simple sentence contains only one independent clause, while a compound sentence contains two or more. In a compound sentence, the clauses are joined by a semicolon or coordinating conjunction like "but," or "so."

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Guest Essay

A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture

By Erik Hoel

Mr. Hoel is a neuroscientist and novelist and the author of The Intrinsic Perspective newsletter.

Increasingly, mounds of synthetic A.I.-generated outputs drift across our feeds and our searches. The stakes go far beyond what’s on our screens. The entire culture is becoming affected by A.I.’s runoff, an insidious creep into our most important institutions.

Consider science. Right after the blockbuster release of GPT-4, the latest artificial intelligence model from OpenAI and one of the most advanced in existence, the language of scientific research began to mutate. Especially within the field of A.I. itself.

Adjectives associated with A.I.-generated text have increased in peer reviews of scientific papers about A.I.

Frequency of adjectives per one million words

Commendable

A study published this month examined scientists’ peer reviews — researchers’ official pronouncements on others’ work that form the bedrock of scientific progress — across a number of high-profile and prestigious scientific conferences studying A.I. At one such conference, those peer reviews used the word “meticulous” more than 34 times as often as reviews did the previous year. Use of “commendable” was around 10 times as frequent, and “intricate,” 11 times. Other major conferences showed similar patterns.

Such phrasings are, of course, some of the favorite buzzwords of modern large language models like ChatGPT. In other words, significant numbers of researchers at A.I. conferences were caught handing their peer review of others’ work over to A.I. — or, at minimum, writing them with lots of A.I. assistance. And the closer to the deadline the submitted reviews were received, the more A.I. usage was found in them.

If this makes you uncomfortable — especially given A.I.’s current unreliability — or if you think that maybe it shouldn’t be A.I.s reviewing science but the scientists themselves, those feelings highlight the paradox at the core of this technology: It’s unclear what the ethical line is between scam and regular usage. Some A.I.-generated scams are easy to identify, like the medical journal paper featuring a cartoon rat sporting enormous genitalia. Many others are more insidious, like the mislabeled and hallucinated regulatory pathway described in that same paper — a paper that was peer reviewed as well (perhaps, one might speculate, by another A.I.?).

What about when A.I. is used in one of its intended ways — to assist with writing? Recently, there was an uproar when it became obvious that simple searches of scientific databases returned phrases like “As an A.I. language model” in places where authors relying on A.I. had forgotten to cover their tracks. If the same authors had simply deleted those accidental watermarks, would their use of A.I. to write their papers have been fine?

What’s going on in science is a microcosm of a much bigger problem. Post on social media? Any viral post on X now almost certainly includes A.I.-generated replies, from summaries of the original post to reactions written in ChatGPT’s bland Wikipedia-voice, all to farm for follows. Instagram is filling up with A.I.-generated models, Spotify with A.I.-generated songs. Publish a book? Soon after, on Amazon there will often appear A.I.-generated “workbooks” for sale that supposedly accompany your book (which are incorrect in their content; I know because this happened to me). Top Google search results are now often A.I.-generated images or articles. Major media outlets like Sports Illustrated have been creating A.I.-generated articles attributed to equally fake author profiles. Marketers who sell search engine optimization methods openly brag about using A.I. to create thousands of spammed articles to steal traffic from competitors.

Then there is the growing use of generative A.I. to scale the creation of cheap synthetic videos for children on YouTube. Some example outputs are Lovecraftian horrors, like music videos about parrots in which the birds have eyes within eyes, beaks within beaks, morphing unfathomably while singing in an artificial voice, “The parrot in the tree says hello, hello!” The narratives make no sense, characters appear and disappear randomly, and basic facts like the names of shapes are wrong. After I identified a number of such suspicious channels on my newsletter, The Intrinsic Perspective, Wired found evidence of generative A.I. use in the production pipelines of some accounts with hundreds of thousands or even millions of subscribers.

As a neuroscientist, this worries me. Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need? Einstein supposedly said : “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” But what happens when a toddler is consuming mostly A.I.-generated dream-slop? We find ourselves in the midst of a vast developmental experiment.

There’s so much synthetic garbage on the internet now that A.I. companies and researchers are themselves worried, not about the health of the culture, but about what’s going to happen with their models. As A.I. capabilities ramped up in 2022, I wrote on the risk of culture’s becoming so inundated with A.I. creations that when future A.I.s are trained, the previous A.I. output will leak into the training set, leading to a future of copies of copies of copies, as content became ever more stereotyped and predictable. In 2023 researchers introduced a technical term for how this risk affected A.I. training: model collapse . In a way, we and these companies are in the same boat, paddling through the same sludge streaming into our cultural ocean.

With that unpleasant analogy in mind, it’s worth looking to what is arguably the clearest historical analogy for our current situation: the environmental movement and climate change. For just as companies and individuals were driven to pollute by the inexorable economics of it, so, too, is A.I.’s cultural pollution driven by a rational decision to fill the internet’s voracious appetite for content as cheaply as possible. While environmental problems are nowhere near solved, there has been undeniable progress that has kept our cities mostly free of smog and our lakes mostly free of sewage. How?

Before any specific policy solution was the acknowledgment that environmental pollution was a problem in need of outside legislation. Influential to this view was a perspective developed in 1968 by Garrett Hardin, a biologist and ecologist. Dr. Hardin emphasized that the problem of pollution was driven by people acting in their own interest, and that therefore “we are locked into a system of ‘fouling our own nest,’ so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.” He summed up the problem as a “tragedy of the commons.” This framing was instrumental for the environmental movement, which would come to rely on government regulation to do what companies alone could or would not.

Once again we find ourselves enacting a tragedy of the commons: short-term economic self-interest encourages using cheap A.I. content to maximize clicks and views, which in turn pollutes our culture and even weakens our grasp on reality. And so far, major A.I. companies are refusing to pursue advanced ways to identify A.I.’s handiwork — which they could do by adding subtle statistical patterns hidden in word use or in the pixels of images.

A common justification for inaction is that human editors can always fiddle around with whatever patterns are implemented if they know enough. Yet many of the issues we’re experiencing are not caused by motivated and technically skilled malicious actors; they’re caused mostly by regular users’ not adhering to a line of ethical use so fine as to be nigh nonexistent. Most would be uninterested in advanced countermeasures to statistical patterns enforced into outputs that should, ideally, mark them as A.I.-generated.

That’s why the independent researchers were able to detect A.I. outputs in the peer review system with surprisingly high accuracy: They actually tried. Similarly, right now teachers across the nation have created home-brewed output-side detection methods , like adding in hidden requests for patterns of word use to essay prompts that appear only when copy-pasted.

In particular, A.I. companies appear opposed to any patterns baked into their output that can improve A.I.-detection efforts to reasonable levels, perhaps because they fear that enforcing such patterns might interfere with the model’s performance by constraining its outputs too much — although there is no current evidence this is a risk. Despite public pledges to develop more advanced watermarking, it’s increasingly clear that the companies are dragging their feet because it goes against the A.I. industry’s bottom line to have detectable products.

To deal with this corporate refusal to act we need the equivalent of a Clean Air Act: a Clean Internet Act. Perhaps the simplest solution would be to legislatively force advanced watermarking intrinsic to generated outputs, like patterns not easily removable. Just as the 20th century required extensive interventions to protect the shared environment, the 21st century is going to require extensive interventions to protect a different, but equally critical, common resource, one we haven’t noticed up until now since it was never under threat: our shared human culture.

Erik Hoel is a neuroscientist, a novelist and the author of The Intrinsic Perspective newsletter.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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