Plural of felucca; small sailing ships with lateen sails, commonly used in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern waters.
From Italian 'feluca,' borrowed from Arabic 'fulk' or related Semitic terms meaning 'ship.' The word traveled through Mediterranean trade languages and entered English through maritime vocabulary in the 16th-17th centuries.
Feluccas represent how trade and travel shaped English vocabulary—the word came to English not from conquest but from merchants and sailors who saw these elegant ships in action and borrowed the term directly from the languages of the regions where they were built and used.
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