captain vs sail

captain

verb
  • To exercise command of a ship, aircraft or sports team. 

  • To act as captain 

noun
  • An honorific title given to a prominent person. See colonel. 

  • The head boy of a school. 

  • A maître d', a headwaiter. 

  • A chief or leader. 

  • An army officer with a rank between the most senior grade of lieutenant and major. 

  • A naval officer with a rank between commander and commodore. 

  • The person lawfully in command of a ship or other vessel. 

  • One of the athletes on a sports team who is designated to make decisions, and is allowed to speak for his team with a referee or official. 

  • A commissioned officer in the United States Navy, Coast Guard, NOAA Corps, or PHS Corps of a grade superior to a commander and junior to a rear admiral (lower half). A captain is equal in grade or rank to a United States Army, Marine Corps, or Air Force colonel. 

  • The leader of a group of workers. 

sail

verb
  • To ride in a boat, especially a sailboat. 

  • To move through or on the water; to swim, as a fish or a waterfowl. 

  • To set sail; to begin a voyage. 

  • To move briskly and gracefully through the air. 

  • To move briskly but sedately. 

  • To deal out (cards) from a distance by impelling them across a surface. 

  • To be impelled or driven forward by the action of wind upon sails, as a ship on water; to be impelled on a body of water by steam or other power. 

noun
  • A piece of fabric attached to a boat and arranged such that it causes the wind to drive the boat along. The sail may be attached to the boat via a combination of mast, spars and ropes. 

  • Anything resembling a sail, such as a wing. 

  • A tower-like structure found on the dorsal (topside) surface of submarines. 

  • A sailfish. 

  • The blade of a windmill. 

  • The power harnessed by a sail or sails, or the use of this power for travel or transport. 

  • The conning tower of a submarine. 

  • The floating organ of siphonophores, such as the Portuguese man-of-war. 

  • an outward projection of the spine, occurring in certain dinosaurs and synapsids 

  • A trip in a boat, especially a sailboat. 

  • The concept of a sail or sails, as if a substance. 

How often have the words captain and sail occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )