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The strange case of the word ‘yacht’

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6 thoughts on “ The strange case of the word ‘yacht’ ”

What serendipity!

Tonight I was reading to LittlePaperMover and the word yacht came up. I thought the word was fascinating from a SP point of view, and tried to work out the sound representations. (I am with your pupil's as i thought it was Y-a-cht, for the same reason they did. )!LittlePaperMover was incredibly unimpressed with the phonics lesson and put her head under the duvet and la-la-lahd until I shut up and got on with the story.

Tomorrow I shall tell her that not only is she an ungrateful small person but that yacht is a pirate word. She does love a pirate. She might learn how to spell yacht.

Hi Papermover, Serendipidous indeed! 'Yacht' is pretty low frequency I would have thought but it does have a habit of popping up in children's stories. If it appears in the middle of a bedtime story, I would definitely leave it until the following day to talk about. As a way of doing it, you might word build it, which would leave the spelling cht for /t/ until last – setting LittlePaperMover up for success. Then, when you've built the word, point to the a and say that it is /o/ as in words like 'was', 'swan', 'swallow', etc. When you point to the cht, you tell her that it's a one-off spelling of the sound /t/. And, then you can talk about derivation or pirates, a technique which is often a useful mnemonic. Similarly if it comes up in the middle of a lesson at school, where at KS2, for example, the focus would probably be on comprehension. The teacher should supply the word and return to it later or on the following day in a phonics session. Anyway, thanks for telling us about your experience. I look forward to some follow-ups.

You and I mean different things by “decodable”.

For me, a decodable word is one which can be read aloud (“decoded”) even if it has never been seen before. On this definition, yacht is not decodable.

Since you think yacht is decodable, you must have a different definition of “decodable”. What is it?

A second example: take the word fleury. A real word, but I expect you haven’t come across it before. The correct way of breaking it up is f l eu r y. But even though I have told you that, I don’t think you will be able to read it aloud correctly. That shows that it is not decodable (in my sense).

Best wishes,

Hi Max, We certainly do have different understandings of the word decodable. For you, 'a word is decodable if it can be read aloud even if it has never been seen before'. For a child in reception, the word 'vet' may not be decodable if, for example, the child has not yet been taught that v represents the sound /v/. So, the ability to decode partly depends on the level of code knowledge a child has. I say 'partly' because decoding ability also depends on the skills a person brings to their reading. Can they segment and blend proficiently enough to be able to use their code knowledge efficently? And then there's the question of a person's understanding of how the code works. So, do they understand that sounds can be spelled with more than one letter, that sounds can be spelled in (often) multiple ways, and do they also know that many spellings can represent different sounds? Given that all of these aspects of decoding have been well taught, I would fully expect some Y2 children and very many Y3 and above pupils to be able to decode 'yacht' successfully, although they may well baulk a little when it came to thinking about remembering how to spell it. That's where the teaching come in! I am also a little surprised you patronise me by assuming I wouldn't be familiar with the word 'fleury' or be able to read it. But, you know what, even if I hadn't been reading words like this since I was in primary school, I would almost certainly be able to decode the word because of the similarity with other spellings of /er/. Of course, it goes without saying that any pupil learning French would be able to handle it after learning 'travailleur', 'meilleur', or, perhaps, the more obvious 'fleur'.

I agree with you John … I like the first Y-ach-t and thought that straight away … probably because I am of the right age to be a big U2 fan. I'll tell my children about "Achtung Baby" to help them remember :).

Thanks again John for making English decodable …

Hmm. Actually, yacht isn't a "pirate ship" word, it's a "hunter of pirate ships" word. (Today's mega-yachts might be considered private pirate ships, but that too iw a whole nother story.)

The only stange thing about the word "yacht" is that it is considered a "strange case." Your first point is well-taken: The English language can easily incorporate pretty much any loan word from any language . This is a strength/asset of the language, not a weakness. It's what makes English the most widely used language in the world. However, there are a number of words, mostly personal and place names, whose Alphabetic Code correspondences follow the loan word history. So if the name of a city or person is written as Jaeger , it could be spoken as yayger, yogger, jayger, or jogger. And the pronunciation of the "er" would vary depending upon whether it was BritSpeak, YankSpeak, or some other Speak. The "assignment" of the correspondences is by convention, but the word is decodable whatever the convention, and once you know the convention, it's "no problem."

Had history gone differently, we could be writing "yacht" as "jacht," and if we are txtg, keying the word as "yot" is OK. The Correspondences are the link between the written and spoken language, but the action is in the Correspondences, not in the sounds or the symbols per se.

Your second point: having analysed the word in the way suggested above, children are far more likely to remember how to spell it in the future is arguable.

1. Some kids will have encountered the word in spoken or written communication and will be able to read it without any additional instruction. For those who can't, saying, "The pronunciation here is 'yot.'" is the the only " reading instruction" needed.

2. Kids are rarely going to have occasion to spell the word, and when they do, there are many alternative words they can use. "Ship" would work for them in most situations.

The nautical Technical Lexicon is large, and there is much more ambiguity in the definition of the word "yacht" than there is in its Alphabetic Code correspondences. Is a dinghy a yacht? How about a cruiser? Is a yacht a boat or a ship? These distinctions are relevant to composition instruction and to Thesaurus use, but they are unproductively redundant in reading instruction.

The broader point is that all English words are decodable. If a word isn't decodable, it's unintelligible. Fxjk is not decodable. F**k, though is decodable, given that you know some specific conventions beyond the Alphabetic Code. Those conventions are no more complicated than those entailed in punctuation marks, or in contractions, abbreviations, and wingdings. But if you haven't been taught the conventions, you will encounter difficulty in reading the text.

The standard definition of "decodable" can easily be checked by googling the term. (The definitions matches your definition.) However, there are "non-standard" definitions of "decodable, such as Max's. When the referents for the term are clear, as in this thread, there is "no problem." But there are big communication problems with non-standard terms in general and with the term "decodable" in particular. Few texts that are proffered as "decodable" actually conform to the standard definition.

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• 1.1 Etymology
• 1.2 Pronunciation
• 1.3.1 Derived terms
• 1.3.2 Translations
• 1.4.1 Translations
• 1.5 Anagrams
• 2.1 Etymology
• 2.2 Pronunciation
• 2.4 Further reading
• 3.1 Etymology
• 3.2 Pronunciation
• 3.4 References
• 3.5 Further reading
• 4.1 Etymology
• 5.1 Etymology
• 5.3 References
• 6.1 Etymology
• 6.3 References
• 7.1 Alternative forms
• 7.2 Etymology
• 7.3.1 Declension
• 7.3.2 Derived terms
• 7.4 Further reading

Circa 1557; variant of yaught , earlier yeaghe ( “ light, fast-sailing ship ” ) , from Dutch jacht ( “ yacht; hunt ” ) , in older spelling jaght(e) , short for jaghtschip ( “ light sailing vessel, fast pirate ship ” , literally “ pursuit ship ” ) , compound of jacht and schip ( “ ship ” ) .

In the 16th century the Dutch built light, fast ships to chase the ships of pirates and smugglers from the coast. The ship was introduced to England in 1660 when the Dutch East India Company presented one to King Charles II, who used it as a pleasure boat, after which it was copied by British shipbuilders as a pleasure craft for wealthy gentlemen.

Pronunciation

• ( UK ) enPR : yŏt , IPA ( key ) : /jɒt/
• ( US ) enPR : yät , IPA ( key ) : /jɑːt/ , /jɑt/

• Rhymes: -ɒt

yacht ( plural yachts )

• 1897 December (indicated as 1898 ), Winston Churchill , chapter X, in The Celebrity: An Episode , New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company ; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd. , →OCLC : The skipper Mr. Cooke had hired at Far Harbor was a God-fearing man with a luke warm interest in his new billet and employer, and had only been prevailed upon to take charge of the yacht after the offer of an emolument equal to half a year's sea pay of an ensign in the navy.
• 1907 August, Robert W[illiam] Chambers , chapter VI, in The Younger Set , New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company , →OCLC : “I don’t mean all of your friends—only a small proportion—which, however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle, brainless bunch—the insolent chatterers at the opera,   [ … ] , the chlorotic squatters on huge yachts ,   [ … ] , the neurotic victims of mental cirrhosis, the jewelled animals whose moral code is the code of the barnyard—!"

Derived terms

• motor yacht , motoryacht , MY
• sailing yacht , steam yacht , SY
• yacht person

Translations

yacht ( third-person singular simple present yachts , present participle yachting , simple past and past participle yachted )

• ( intransitive ) To sail , voyage , or race in a yacht .

• Cathy , tachy , tachy- , yatch

Borrowed from English yacht , from Dutch jacht .

• IPA ( key ) : /jɔt/ , /jot/ , ( Canada ) /jat/

yacht   m ( plural yachts )

Further reading

• “ yacht ”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [ Digitized Treasury of the French Language ] , 2012 .

Unadapted borrowing from English yacht .

• IPA ( key ) : /ˈjɔt/ [ 1 ]
• Rhymes: -ɔt

yacht   m ( invariable )

• the letter Y in the Italian spelling alphabet
• ^ yacht in Luciano Canepari , Dizionario di Pronuncia Italiana (DiPI)
• yacht in Treccani.it – Vocabolario Treccani on line , Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana

Borrowed from English yacht .

yacht   ? ( plural yachts )

• ( Jersey ) yacht

Norwegian Bokmål

From Dutch jacht , via English yacht .

yacht   m ( definite singular yachten , indefinite plural yachter , definite plural yachtene )

• “yacht” in The Bokmål Dictionary .

Norwegian Nynorsk

yacht   m ( definite singular yachten , indefinite plural yachtar , definite plural yachtane )

• “yacht” in The Nynorsk Dictionary .

Alternative forms

yacht   c

• yacht in Svenska Akademiens ordlista ( SAOL )
• yacht in Svensk ordbok ( SO )
• yacht in Svenska Akademiens ordbok ( SAOB )
• yacht in Svenskt nautiskt lexikon (1920)

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Meaning of yacht in English

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• They spent their annual holiday on a chartered yacht in the Caribbean .
• He spent three days adrift on his yacht.
• His eyes were fixed on the distant yacht.
• If they can afford a yacht, they must be rolling in it.
• She sailed around the world single-handed in her yacht.
• cabin cruiser
• dragon boat

yacht | American Dictionary

Examples of yacht, collocations with yacht.

These are words often used in combination with yacht .

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

Translations of yacht

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Word of the Day

situationship

a romantic relationship between two people who do not yet consider themselves a couple but who have more than a friendship

A safe pair of hands (Newspaper idioms)

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Yatch or Yacht – Which is Correct?

• by Sarah Thompson
• March 1, 2024

Yacht or yatch, which is it? This is a common question that many people have when it comes to spelling this particular word. Whether you’re a native English speaker or someone who is learning English as a second language, it’s important to get the spelling and usage of words right. In this case, the correct spelling is “yacht.”

Now, let’s learn why “yacht” is the correct spelling and how you can remember it with a few simple examples.

Firstly, the word “yacht” is of Dutch origin, and it refers to a luxurious, recreational boat typically used for pleasure or racing. This word has been a part of the English language for centuries, and over time, it has become widely accepted and recognized.

To understand why “yacht” is the correct spelling, let’s look at the pronunciation of the word. It is important to remember that the “ch” in “yacht” is pronounced as a “k” sound, as in the word “cat.” This pronunciation is consistent with other words like “ache,” “architect,” and “mocha.”

Now, let’s consider some examples to solidify your understanding. Imagine you are having a conversation with someone, and you want to mention a luxurious boat that you saw during your vacation. You could say, “I saw a beautiful yacht in the harbor yesterday.” Here, using the correct spelling “yacht” helps you effectively communicate your message, ensuring that others can understand the specific type of boat you are referring to.

Furthermore, imagine you are reading a brochure about an upcoming regatta, a prestigious sailing competition. The brochure would likely use the correct spelling “yacht” to describe the boats participating in the event, such as “The world’s finest yachts will be racing against each other.”

It is worth noting that common misspellings such as “yatch” or “yeacht” may occur due to the “ch” sound in “yacht.” However, it is essential to remember that confusing the “ch” sound with a “tch” sound, as in the words “catch” or “watch,” is incorrect.

To ensure that you are using the correct spelling “yacht,” you can try a simple trick to remember it. Think of a yacht as a “yummy and cool boat.” By associating the word “yummy” with the letter “y” and the word “cool” with the “ch” sound, you can remember the correct spelling and pronunciation.

In conclusion, the correct spelling of this luxurious boat is “yacht.” The word has a rich history and is widely recognized in the English language. Remember to pronounce the “ch” sound as a “k” sound. By using the correct spelling “yacht” in your conversations and writing, you can effectively communicate and demonstrate your understanding of the English language. So, next time you encounter this word, remember, “yacht” is the way to go!

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How To Spell yacht ?

How to pronounce yacht.

Correct pronunciation for the word "yacht" is [jˈɒt], [jˈɒt], [j_ˈɒ_t].

Definition of yacht

A swift-sailing, light, and elegantly furnished vessel, used either for private parties of pleasure, or as a vessel of state to convey princes, &c., from one place to another.

To sail in a yacht.

Nuttall's Standard dictionary of the English language By Nuttall, P.Austin

What are the misspellings for yacht?

What are similar-sounding words for yacht, what is the present tense of yacht.

• In the present tense, the personal forms of the verb " yacht " are:
• - You yacht
• - He yachts
• - She yachts
• - It yachts
• - They yacht

What is the past tense of Yacht?

• The personal forms of the verb " yacht " in the past tense are as follows:
• 1. I yachted
• 2. You yachted
• 3. He yachted
• 4. She yachted
• 5. It yachted
• 6. We yachted
• 7. You yachted
• 8. They yachted

What is the adverb for yacht?

The adverb form of the word "yacht" is "yachtingly" .

What is the adjective for yacht?

The adjective form of the word "yacht" is "yachting" .

Usage over time for yacht:

This graph shows how "yacht" have occurred between 1800 and 2008 in a corpus of English books.

What is the plural form of yacht?

The plural of the "yacht" can be the " yachts ".

What is the singular form of yacht?

The singular of the "yacht" can be the "yacht".

Synonyms for Yacht:

• aircraft carrier
• cabin cruiser
• fishing boat

Nearby words

• Yacca Podocarp
• yacht chair
• yacht clubs
• Correct spelling for yacht [Infographic] | Spellchecker.net
• yacht - English spelling dictionary
• Yacht | Definition of yacht by Merriam-Webster
• Yacht definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary
• Yacht | Definition of yacht at Dictionary.com
• Yacht dictionary definition | yacht defined

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Definition of yacht noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

Was this all a joke?

You could be excused for thinking that much of English pronunciation was invented by a trickster god, one with a particularly cruel streak. After all, how else could we have come to a place where through doesn’t rhyme with though , enough doesn’t rhyme with lough , and cough doesn’t rhyme with hiccough ? We’re happy to tell you that there was no trickster god involved: there are reasons for why things are the way they are. Read on, and we’ll explain one of the great mysteries of our language: why so many of the letters seem to be just sitting around doing no work.

Some letters are silent in English because they are part of sound combinations that are so uncommon that English speakers ultimately resist pronouncing them. Our language is a glutton, and it has taken words from an enormous number of other languages. Since we have words borrowed from languages that have different sound patterns, this results in English speakers pronouncing the words differently than in their languages of origin.

That’s why the m is silent in mnemonic , a word meaning “assisting memory” or “relating to memory.” Mnemonic came to English from Greek through Latin during the 1600s, when many words of Classical origin were introduced by scholarly writers.

It is documented that the m was pronounced before the n as recently as the late 1800s, and has since dropped away.

There are very few words in English that begin with ¬ mn , and most of them are rare words that share the ultimate Greek root of the word meaning “to remember,” including mneme (pronounced /NEE-mee/), mnestic , mnemotechnical , and the name of the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne .

psychology, psalm, pseudo

There are thousands of English words with Greek roots, and most of these begin in a manner that looks pretty reasonable to many users of English (think of words beginning with anti , like antipathy ). However, there are others from Greek which begin with a pair (or more!) of consonants that English does not use so often. One of the more common cases of this is the combination ps , seen in words like psalm , psalter , and pseudo (which comes from the Greek word meaning “to lie” or “to cheat”).

Psychology and the words related to it are the most frequently encountered of these words, which are pronounced with an /s/ sound—the p is silent in English. In German and French, the p is pronounced, however, and sounded just before the s , and over a hundred years ago the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary made it known that he thought we should restore the /p/ in English pronunciation, too.

His recommendations were ignored.

pneumatic, pneumonia

Another silent p is found immediately before the letter n in words like pneumatic and pneumonia .

These words came to English through Latin from the Greek word meaning “wind,” “breath,” “air,” or “spirit,” pneumatic means “relating to or using air” (such as tires on a car) and pneumonia refers to a disease of the lungs. Most of the English words you come across that begin with pneu - are going to directly relate to air (especially in medical or scientific contexts), but every once in a while one will sneak in with a slightly different type of meaning, as with pneumatology ("the study of spiritual beings or phenomena").

For words spelled with this pattern, the p is still pronounced in modern French.

yacht, night, light

Yacht came to English from Dutch, and the Dutch pronounce the ch with a rasping sound from the back of the throat, a sound heard in German words like buch (“book”) and Scots words like loch (“lake”).

Linguists use the term velar fricative to describe this sound, with velar from the Latin word for “curtain” meaning the soft palate or the flap at the back of the roof of the mouth, and fricative from the Latin word meaning “to rub.” Since this sound isn’t part of conventional English phonetics today, the ch has become silent over time.

The same thing can be said for words that developed directly from Old English and are spelled with what is now a silent gh , like light, fright, night , and sight , which were originally pronounced with that raspy back-of-the-throat sound. The now-silent ch and gh in these words in fact represent the same former pronunciation, transcribed in different ways. In fact, the Dutch and German ancestors of sight and light and right were spelled with ch rather than gh .

Perhaps the oddest-looking collection of consonants at the beginning of an English word is the strange chth in chthonic , pronounced /THON-ik/, which comes from the Greek word meaning “earth” or “world” and is a fancy way to say “relating to the underworld” or “infernal.”

In Greek mythology, it referred to the realm of the dead, where spirits would reside in the afterlife, overseen by Hades, king of the underworld (and the underworld itself was sometimes called Hades ). Like the now-silent ch in yacht , the ch , originally produced as a rasping sound from the back of the throat, has vanished in modern English.

If you really like using this word, but think that it’s kind of weird that the first C gets all the attention while the C that comes at the end does all the actual work, you can instead use chthonian , which means the same thing.

Chutzpah was defined in jocular fashion by Leo Rosten in his 1968 book The Joys of Yiddish with this: “Chutzpah is that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.” Being a dictionary, we don’t really do jocular; our definition is “supreme self-confidence,” or “nerve, gall .”

One of the many words English has borrowed from Yiddish, chutzpah is spelled with the ch that is now usually pronounced as /h/, making the c silent. The ch stood for the rasping sound from the back of the throat that exists in many languages, but not English, so it has dropped away.

calm, palm, talk

We mostly don’t hear the L in words like palm and calm , and this is also a pronunciation that has changed. The “dark” sound of the letter L is one that can change the sound of the vowel that comes before it as it melts into the m . This is why the vowel sounds are different in word pairs like calm and cat and talk and tack .

(If you want to hear the difference between a "light" and "dark" L, say the word lull . The initial /L/ is "light", pronounced at the front of the mouth, while the final /L/ is "dark", spoken by raising the back of the tongue slightly.)

This is the same process that causes the sound of L to become a vowel sound in some Cockney accents, when a word like trouble is pronounced /TRUH-boe/ or in some pronunciations of help that don’t have a clear L sound.

should, would, could

Yes, the L in should and would used to be pronounced (but no, you are not making a mistake in not pronouncing it now). These words would have rhymed with gold and told (consider how we pronounce shoulder and boulder ). Accounts by language commentators from the 1500s show that these Ls were pronounced in refined speech, but then dropped during the following century.

It seems likely that could didn’t have the L in either spelling or pronunciation; notice that its root, can doesn’t have an L whereas shall and will (the roots of should and would ) do. The thought is that the L in could was later added by analogy—rightly or wrongly—to make it better match with would and should .

knife, knight, gnaw

The basic rule is: “word + time = change.” The initial kn or gn sounds in words like knife, knight , and gnaw were pronounced several hundred years ago. Over time, the sound clusters have simplified into the single /n/ sound that we know (ahem) today. There isn’t necessarily a reason or any logic attached to all of these changes; in fact, if the spellings of these words didn’t fossilize the original way that they were pronounced, we wouldn’t have any reason to think about this kind of phonetic change.

wrap, write

Once upon a time the W in words like wrap and write was pronounced. Today we don’t hear it, and this time the reason is partially anatomical and not just phonetic (when we say the reason you don’t hear this is anatomical it is because of the shape of your lips, and not of your ears; your ears are just fine).

When you make the /r/ sound in modern English, your lips protrude a bit (say “ruh”) just as they do when you pronounce a /w/ sound (say “wuh”). Since these two sounds are made in ways that have physically similar lip positions and sounds that are difficult to distinguish when you say one right after the other, they eventually merged together.

soften, listen, often

The /t/ in words like soften, hasten , and fasten was originally pronounced, after the -en was added to the words soft, haste , and fast . Listen is a bit different, since it comes from from the Middle English word listnen , and evidence suggests that Middle English speakers wouldn’t pronounce /t/ when it was stuck between /s/ and /n/. (This may seem like a lot of history for a simple spelling explainer, but isn’t it nice to know that people who spoke Middle English many hundreds of years ago had to wrestle with tricky silent letters as well?)

Is the t in these words always silent, though? The t in often is in fact sometimes pronounced. Like the others in this category, it had been pronounced initially, and, also like the others, we hear the /t/ in the word’s root oft , which is now archaic for most of the senses of often , but is still used in compound adjectives like oft-repeated and oft-quoted . Ofttimes and oftentimes also have that archaic flavor but are still in active use. After the -en suffix was added to oft , the /t/ fell away in pronunciation, but remained in the spelling.

But in this case, the /t/ came back via a spelling-influenced pronunciation in the 1600s, as both literacy and printing expanded rapidly in England. There is evidence that Queen Elizabeth herself did not pronounce the /t/, resulting in the establishment of the prestige pronunciation for often that remains to this day (although pronouncing the t in often is by now a standard choice).

receipt, debt, indict

An artificial evolution is visible in the silent letters of words like receipt, debt , and indict . These words entered English from French in the medieval period, but later scholars recognized their Latin origins and stuck in the missing p, b , and c , just to make the etymological relationship completely explicit. The way we pronounce these words to this day reflects their French heritage (while their spelling reflects their more distant Latin roots). Other silent letters that scholars have snuck in to help English show off its Latin roots include the b in doubt and the l in balm .

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What is the reason behind the spelling of the word ‘yacht’?

Yachts are known for their elegance, luxury and sophistication, but have you ever stopped to wonder why this nautical term is spelled the way it is? The spelling of the word ‘yacht’ is not intuitive and may leave some people bewildered. However, there is a fascinating history behind the word that dates back to the 16th century.

The word ‘yacht’ originally comes from the Dutch word ‘jacht’, which means “hunt”. During the 16th century, the Dutch used small, fast vessels to chase pirates and smugglers, and these ships were called ‘jachts’. These vessels were generally smaller than traditional sailing ships and were built for speed and agility.

As these Dutch ships began to gain popularity, they were soon adopted by wealthy individuals who used them for pleasure cruising. These pleasure boats were also referred to as ‘jachts’ and they were often used for leisurely sailing and entertaining guests.

As the popularity of these vessels increased, the word ‘jacht’ was adopted by other countries, including England. However, the pronunciation and spelling of the word began to change over time. In England, the word was pronounced with a hard ‘ch’ sound, which eventually morphed into the ‘k’ sound we hear today. The ‘ch’ spelling was also changed to ‘cht’, giving rise to the current spelling of ‘yacht’.

Interestingly, despite the change in spelling, the word ‘yacht’ is still pronounced differently in various regions around the world. In the U.S., for example, it is pronounced with a long ‘a’ sound as ‘yah-t’, while in the U.K. it is pronounced with a short ‘a’ sound as ‘yat’.

The spelling of the word ‘yacht’ may seem unconventional, but it has a rich history dating back to the Dutch word ‘jacht’. While the pronunciation and spelling may vary around the world, the elegance and luxury associated with these vessels remain universal. So, whether you prefer to pronounce it ‘yat’ or ‘yah-t’, one thing is for certain – a yacht is the quintessential symbol of luxury and indulgence on the high seas.

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