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A flotilla is a group of small ships sailing together. A navy might send a flotilla of patrol boats; newspapers also stretch it to any crowd of small boats, even fishing boats or yachts. It sounds a bit like news language or the navy. In everyday talk people often just say “a group of boats.” It is the little-group word: a fleet is the big force, a flotilla is a smaller bunch of vessels.
小艦隊；小型船隊
組成From Spanish flotilla, the diminutive of flota, “fleet” — so “little fleet.” Spanish flota came from French flotte.
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
flotillanoun/floʊˈtɪlə/
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nauticaltransportA small fleet of warships (usually of the same class), or a fleet of small ships.
- Toward the horizon a flotilla of fishing-boats showed immutable, pink-lacquered by the evening sun.
- Driven from their home system by the geth nearly three centuries ago, most quarians now live aboard the Migrant Fleet, a flotilla of fifty thousand vessels ranging in size from passenger shuttles to mobile space stations. Home to 17 million quarians, the flotilla understandably has scarce resources. Because of this, each quarian must go on a rite of passage known as the Pilgrimage when they come of age. They leave the fleet and only return once they have found something of value they can bring back to their people.
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A small group of things or people
- After a few moments Chloe saw Rosamund walking towards them with a small flotilla of shopping bags.
- flotilla of tiny ducklings
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cellular-automatacomputingengineeringA spaceship made of one or more central mutually stabilizing overweight spaceships flanked by lightweight, middleweight, or heavyweight spaceships that prevent the formation of destructive eggs.
- For rule R(2222) a flotilla of six gliders traveling eastwards is generated.
- Now, the smallest known Life spaceship that isn’t a glider, a *WSS, or a flotilla of *WSSs is the loafer, which has population 20 in a 9 by 9 bounding box.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。