razee

From French vaisseau rasé, from raser (“to rase, to cut down ships”). See raze and rase (verbs).

razee (plural razees)

1. (nautical) An armed ship with its upper deck cut away, and thus reduced to the next inferior rate, such as a seventy-four cut down to a frigate.
   • 1838, Edmund Fanning, Voyages to the South Seas […] :

     an old line-of-battle ship, (21 years of age,) cut down to a razee

razee (third-person singular simple present razees, present participle razeeing, simple past and past participle razeed)

1. (transitive, nautical) To cut (a ship) down to a smaller number of decks, and thus to an inferior rate or class.
2. (transitive, figurative) To trim or abridge by cutting off parts.

   to razee a book, or an article

   • 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “chapter 36”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:

     "Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!"

• “razee”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

• zeera