spencer

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A man's outer garment or overcoat so short that the skirts of the body-coat worn under it were seen: a fashion introduced about 1800.
• noun A woman's garment introduced a year or two later, and made in direct imitation of the above.
• noun Nautical, a trapezoidal fore-and-aft sail set abaft the foremast and mainmast; a trysail.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun obsolete One who has the care of the spence, or buttery.
• noun A short jacket worn by men and by women.
• noun (Naut.) A fore-and-aft sail, abaft the foremast or the mainmast, hoisted upon a small supplementary mast and set with a gaff and no boom; a trysail carried at the foremast or mainmast; -- named after its inventor, Knight Spencer, of England [1802].
• noun a small mast just abaft the foremast or mainmast, for hoisting the spencer.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A short, close-fitting jacket primarily worn by women and children in the early nineteenth century; probably named after George Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer (1758-1834).
• noun A thin knitted woollen vest.
• noun A large loose-fitted gaffsail on a square-rigger or barque, used from the nineteenth century onwards.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun English philosopher and sociologist who applied the theory of natural selection to human societies (1820-1903)