The Etymology of Dinghy
Dinghy entered English around 1810 from the Indian subcontinent, where Hindi diṅgī and Bengali ḍiṅgi named the small open rowing boats used on the Ganges, the Hooghly, and the countless inland waterways of Bengal. British East India Company officers and sailors picked up the word for the small boats they used to transfer between ship and shore — and brought it home. The original Anglo-Indian spelling was dingee, which then settled into dinghy by the late 19th century, with the h perhaps added to mark the hard g sound (so it would not be read as ginny). The word travelled the same colonial-linguistic route as bungalow, jungle, pyjama, shampoo, verandah, and chutney, all loans from Hindi or Bengali. By the early 20th century dinghy had broadened in nautical English to mean any small open boat — including the inflatable rubber rafts of life-rafts, the wooden tenders of yachts, and the racing dinghies of competitive sailing.