Rating System of The Royal Navy - Practices in Other Navies

Practices in Other Navies

Although the rating system described in this article was only used by the Royal Navy, other major navies used similar means of grading their warships. For example, the French Navy used a system of five rates ("rangs") which had a similar purpose. British authors might still use "first rate" when referring to the largest ships of other nations or "third rate" to speak of a French seventy-four. By the end of the 18th century, the rating system had mostly fallen out of common use (although technically it remained in existence for nearly another century), ships of the line usually being characterized directly by their nominal number of guns, the numbers even being used as the name of the type, as in "a squadron of three seventy-fours".