A large merchant ship, especially one carrying valuable cargo; a fleet of such ships.
From Italian 'Ragusea' (a ship from Ragusa, a major medieval port). The word traveled through Venetian trade networks into English during the Renaissance.
The word 'argosy' preserves the memory of Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) as a medieval superpower of Mediterranean trade—Venice and Ragusa were the Amazon and Google of the 1400s!
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