FRIGATE

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does frigate mean? 

• FRIGATE (noun)
  The noun FRIGATE has 2 senses:

1. a medium size square-rigged warship of the 18th and 19th centuries

2. a United States warship larger than a destroyer and smaller than a cruiser

  Familiarity information: FRIGATE used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• FRIGATE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A medium size square-rigged warship of the 18th and 19th centuries

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Hypernyms ("frigate" is a kind of...):

combat ship; war vessel; warship (a government ship that is available for waging war)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A United States warship larger than a destroyer and smaller than a cruiser

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Hypernyms ("frigate" is a kind of...):

combat ship; war vessel; warship (a government ship that is available for waging war)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "frigate"):

guided missile frigate (a frigate that carries guided missiles)

 Context examples 

It made them mad to think of all they had done in the south, and then to see this saucy frigate flashing her money before their eyes.”

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

You are like a frigate bird swooping down upon the boobies and robbing them of the fish they have caught.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

When you come to a frigate, of course, you are more confined; though any reasonable woman may be perfectly happy in one of them; and I can safely say, that the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

There was the Xebec frigate out of Barcelona with twenty thousand Spanish dollars aboard, which make four thousand of our pounds.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I knew that we should either go to the bottom together, or that she would be the making of me; and I never had two days of foul weather all the time I was at sea in her; and after taking privateers enough to be very entertaining, I had the good luck in my passage home the next autumn, to fall in with the very French frigate I wanted.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

“What the cruiser gets the cruiser earns,” cried a frigate captain.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He had been several years at sea, and had, in the course of those removals to which all midshipmen are liable, and especially such midshipmen as every captain wishes to get rid of, been six months on board Captain Frederick Wentworth's frigate, the Laconia; and from the Laconia he had, under the influence of his captain, written the only two letters which his father and mother had ever received from him during the whole of his absence; that is to say, the only two disinterested letters; all the rest had been mere applications for money.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

Can you deny that a seaman before the mast makes more in a fast frigate than a lieutenant can in a battleship?

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I had a share of both last cruise, which comes from changing a line-of-battleship for a frigate.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I have handled a sloop, a corvette, and a frigate, and I have found a great variety of duties in each of them.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)