merchant marine
- noun
- /ˈmɜrʧənt məˈrin/
- US
:
marina mercante
- The government invested heavily in the merchant marine to enhance the country's trade capacity.
- the American merchant marine
Examples
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An extensive merchant marine network secured by a strong navy was vital to the expansion of European commercial and political hegemony during the nineteenth century (Christopher 1988).
Academic text (1994) -
The American merchant marine plays a crucial role in transporting goods across the globe.
-
During the war, the merchant marine was essential for delivering supplies to soldiers overseas.
How Big
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is transparently compositional: 'merchant' (commerce-related) combined with 'marine' (relating to ships/seafaring) straightforwardly yields the sense of commercial ships or a country's commercial fleet. This pattern is cross-linguistically common (e.g. Spanish 'marina mercante', French 'marine marchande') and follows regular English noun–adjective/compound composition, so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer the meaning.
Etymology
Merchant marine comes from a simple image: merchant means trader and marine means ships or sailors at sea. It refers to a country's trading ships that carry goods and people, so it means the nation's 'commercial' fleet, not its warships.