“Getting to terms with the sea: maritime terminology in the 1701 Dictionnaire Universel” concerns the second edition very important French dictionary that is commonly known as the Furetière after the name of the first author Abbé Antoine Furetière. The dictionary was published in The Hague and Rotterdam in 1690, two years after the death of its author. The publishers, Arnoud and Regnier Leers, commissioned a Protestant refugee, Henri Basnage de Beauval to correct and revise the work, and it is this edition which is now considered as the reference version. For ease of description, we shall use the name Furetière to describe the 1690 edition and Basnage for the 1701, although Basnage himself never claimed the dictionary as his own. This is a small insight into a very big part of the dictionary. The Dictionnaire universal sought to be encyclopaedic and thus maritime terminology was one of the biggest terminological aspects of the dictionary. We are concerned with the entries, but also sources for the definitions and how way entries were expanded in this Basnage edition.