Backstay
- n. A rope or strap used to prevent excessive forward motion.
- n. A rope or stay extending from the masthead to the side of a ship, slanting a little aft, to assist the shrouds in supporting the mast.
The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.