YAWL  , the name of a

special rig of small sailing vessels or yachts, with two masts, the mainmast cutter-rigged, and a small mizzen stepped far aft with a spanker or driving sail . The name has also been applied to a small ship's boat rowed with four or more oars . The word is apparently an adaptation of the Dutch jol, skiff . The English jolly-boat," a small bluff-bowed, wide-transomed ship's boat, swung at the stern of a vessel for ready use, is probably a corruption of the Danish form of the word jolle . Other authorities take it to be a corruption of a late 15th-century jolywat, a small ship's boat, which is supposed to represent galiote, galliot (see GALLEY) . A galliot, however, was never a small boat, but an in-dependent vessel propelled by oars or sails .