A regatta is a sports meeting where boats race — either rowing boats, with people pulling oars, or sailing boats moved by the wind. It is not one race but the whole event: a day, a weekend, sometimes a week, with many races, a crowd on the bank, flags, prizes. That whole-event meaning is important. One race is a race; the gathering that holds the races is the regatta. The word is strongly tied to a certain picture in British life: a summer river, schools and universities competing, people in blazers and hats on the grass drinking something cold. Henley Royal Regatta is the famous one. So the word can carry a faint feeling of money and old tradition, though there are plenty of small, ordinary local regattas too, and plenty of serious sailing regattas around the world that are nothing but hard competition. Because of the boating-club picture, English has also borrowed the word into clothes: regatta stripes, or a regatta blazer, means the bright vertical stripes that rowing clubs wear. You may see it on shirts in a shop with no boat anywhere near. The word came into English from Italian — from Venice, where boat races on the canals have been held for hundreds of years.