Saturday, December 01, 2007

#260 MS is different than MV

When the MS Explorer sank (see video) off the coast of Antarctica last week, some folks thought it was the MV Explorer. Not so! The MV Explorer used by Semester at Sea is safe and sound and sailing across the Atlantic Ocean right now. No icebergs are in sight. (Beware: the youtube video is incorrectly labeled "MV Explorer sinking in Antarctica.")

But this did make me wonder about the difference between MS and MV. According to the ship prefix entry in wikipedia, there are more than 30 abbreviations used in front of a ship's name. MS stands for motor ship. MV stands for motor vessel. Can you guess what FV stands for? Or PS?

Yours in appreciation of the multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project that we know as wikipedia,
Mary

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