Nautes

Nautes is a term that originates in Ancient Greek and is used to denote a sailor or mariner. In Greek, naútēs (ναύτης) refers to a person who sails or serves on a ship; the standard Greek plural is naútai (ναῦται). In Latin, the corresponding noun is nauta with the plural nautae, and some later Latinized spellings or transliterations render the form as nautes in certain texts. In English-language scholarship, nautes appears mainly in linguistic or classical contexts and is not a common everyday noun.

In modern English, the root appears most often as a combining form in a class of words ending in -naut, such as astronaut, aeronaut, cosmonaut, and aquanaut. These terms derive from the Greek naútēs via Latin and English adaptation, and they carry the sense of traveler or voyager rather than a literal sea sailor in most contemporary uses. The suffix -naut has come to signify travel through air or space rather than navigation on water, reflecting the metaphorical extension of the sailor idea.

Related terms include nautical, which comes from Latin nauticus and Greek naútikos and pertains to ships, sailing, and seafaring. The root also appears in the name Nautilus, a genus of mollusks named with sailor imagery in mind.

Nautes thus occupies a place in linguistic history as the ancient word for seafarer and as the etymological source for modern compound terms that describe traversing realms beyond the sea.