Indiaman

English

Etymology

From India +‎ -man.

Noun

Indiaman (plural Indiamen)

1. (nautical) A large ship that traded between Britain and India on behalf of the East India Company.
   • 1841, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Warren Hastings:

     No place is so propitious to the formation either of close friendships or of deadly enmities as an Indiaman

   • 1924 September, Arthur Conan Doyle, “Sidelights on Sherlock Holmes”, in Memories and Adventures, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, and Company, →OCLC, page 110:

     Buried treasures are naturally among the problems which have come to Mr. [Sherlock] Holmes. One genuine case was accompanied by a diagram here reproduced. [...] Each Indiaman in those days had its own semaphore code, and it is conjectured that the three marks upon the left are signals from a three-armed semaphore.

Derived terms

• West Indiaman

 

Further reading

• East Indiaman on Wikipedia.Wikipedia