nautas

Nautas is the plural form of nauta, a word with roots in Latin that means sailor. In classical Latin, nauta referred to sailors serving in the Roman navy or merchant marine, and the standard Latin plural is nautae. In some later or modern texts, the form nautas appears, reflecting Latin plurals adapted to other languages. The root nauta has informed the English suffix -naut, which is used to name travelers or explorers in specific domains.

Historically, nauta denoted someone who worked at sea, and the term appears in Latin literature and inscriptions describing sailors and maritime activity. The word is primarily of scholarly and historical interest today, rather than a common everyday term in most modern Romance languages, where words like marinero or marinheiro are more typical for “sailor,” though nauta can appear in historical or literary contexts.

In contemporary usage, the standalone plural "nautas" is uncommon in English outside of linguistic or historical discussion. More broadly, the root -naut has become a productive prefix in English to form words such as astronaut (space traveler), cosmonaut (Russian space traveler), aquanaut (underwater explorer), and aeronaut (air traveler). These terms, while related to exploration and travel, do not necessarily imply a direct connection to the historical sailor sense of nauta, but they share the underlying idea of navigating a realm.

See also: nautical, navigation, sailor, astronaut, cosmonaut, aquanaut, aeronaut.