conn

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Conn (nautical)

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• con

Variant of cond, from Middle English conduen, condien, from Anglo-Norman conduire, from Latin condūcō (“lead, bring or draw together”), from con- (“with, together”) +‎ dūcō (“lead”). Doublet of conduce.

• (General American) IPA^(key): /kɑn/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /kɒn/
• Homophone: con
• Rhymes: -ɒn

conn (plural conns)

1. The duty of directing a ship, usually used with the verb to have or to take and accompanied by the article "the."

   The officer of the deck has the conn of the vessel; the captain took the conn when he reached the bridge.

• have the conn (have the con)
• take the conn (take the con)

conn (third-person singular simple present conns, present participle conning, simple past and past participle conned)

1. (transitive) To direct a ship; to superintend the steering of (a vessel); to watch the course of (a vessel) and direct the helmsman how to steer (especially through a channel, etc, rather than steer a compass direction).

   The pilot conned the ship safely into the harbor.

   • 1724, Daniel Defoe, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, chapter 8:

     “Ay,” says I, “you’ll allow me to steer, that is, hold the helm, but you’ll conn the ship, as they call it; that is, as at sea, a boy serves to stand at the helm, but he that gives him the orders is pilot.”

• conning line
• conning officer
• conning tower

Back-formation from the genitive singular and nominative plural cuinn and dative singular cunn, ultimately from Proto-Celtic *kʷennom (“head”). In Primitive Irish, the genitive singular *kʷennī (attested as -ᚉᚓᚅᚅᚔ (-cennī)) raised to *kʷinnī and then the resulting *i was rounded by the initial labiovelar to result in Old Irish cuinn. In case-forms without raising, the etymological e remained as such since it was not regularly rounded by labiovelars, hence an original nominative singular cenn. Since u in o-stem nouns usually alternates with o, not e (which usually alternates with i in o-stems), two separate nouns, cenn and conn arose.

conn m (genitive cuinn)

1. leader
2. adult, grown-up
3. sense, intelligence

• Middle Irish: conn
  • Irish: conn
  • Scottish Gaelic: conn (“sense, reason”)

• Gregory Toner, Sharon Arbuthnot, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Marie-Luise Theuerkauf, Dagmar Wodtko, editors (2019), “conn”, in eDIL: Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language