Jane S Dictionary Of Naval Terms

Most professions have their own languages, and the U.S. Navy with its obscure terms and labored acronyms is certainly no exception. Those in and out of the naval profession will find this dictionary an essential tool in deciphering their unique language, which has its origins in the days of sail and continues to mutate in the ever-growing vocabulary of technology. For this completely revised and fully updated edition, Deborah Cutler and Thomas Cutler identify and clearly define a vast array of terms that can make documents and conversations with naval professionals so bewildering. Highly qualified 'NAVSPEAK linguists, the Cutlers have built upon the original works, culling, adding, and bringing the entries up to date for the twenty-first century. Official terms like Seapower 21 are included as well as such colorful, unofficial vocabulary as cannon cocker. Helpful notations of word origins for the very old and very new make definitions even clearer.

Submariners are a tight knit group of men bound together by training and experience, and with a language all their own. That language is perhaps a little vulgar, but never intentionally demeaning, and a little irreverent but still worldly. This work is an attempt to preserve and explain some of these curious guys who so proudly wear a shiny metal pin that looks like a strange pair of fish on their left breast. This process of accumulating this new language begins in Boot Camp, and is added to with every change of duty station the sailor undergoes. It is heard aboard the boats and, unknowingly, by family members who can't understand terms like head, deck, and overhead, and who think SOS is a distress signal.

Every field of human activity develops its own terms and jargon, and the military field is no exception. This timely and necessary dictionary includes fundamental military terms, contemporary political and technological terms and jargon, military technique terms for the specialist, as well as words in allied subjects such as economics, law, statistics and sociology. The following are among the comprehensive number of military terms found in this dictionary: air reconnaissance, cluster bomb, estimated time of arrival, firing pin, intercontinental ballistic missile, logbook, metagon, orbital velocity, rate of fire, squadron, target allocation, verification fire, zero hour. In giving the equivalent Arabic terms, reference has been accorded to those terms agreed by the Arabic Academic Centres in Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Baghdad and Rabbat, and to the widely accepted terms that have been coined by contemporary specialists and linguists.