The meaning and origins of word “COCKPIT”

The word Cockpit, which is identified with airplanes today, means the name of the section where the driver of a vehicle is located.

Cockpits are usually located at the front and top of vehicles. Due to their position, they provide a good view to the driver. Devices and panels used to control the vehicle are also found in this section.

So why do we use the word cockpit to describe these sections? Have you ever thought about the meaning of this word and where it came from?

The first cockpits are actually based on cockfights.

It was the name of the small pits used for cockfighting.

Cockfighting is a wild game that is thought to date back to ancient china and is considered as sport by some people. And cockfights were mostly played for gambling purposes.

The cockpit, which is the name of this wild game, has been used in English since the 16th century. By the 1700s, the word cockpit became a metaphor for describing any combat fighting scene. This use has become very common, especially in some regions of Belgium and France, which are known as traditional battlefields.

Later, the word cockpit was adopted by aircraft pilots and aviators of the period during the 1st World War. And it began to be used to describe the congested operation centers of the fighter aircraft of that era.

Our modern sense of cockpit includes the entire crew areas of large airliners, which are usually fairly spacious and not, one hopes, the scene of conflict.

It is known that many terms used in aviation are of maritime origin. before the word was applied to aeroplanes, it served to describe a space from which boats were steered and this transference was probably based on architectural similarity to real cockpits.

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