The word "dinghy" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to a small boat, usually kept as a dinghy on a larger boat or yacht. For example: "We brought our dinghy along on our sailing trip to explore the coastline."
It will also be an Olympic year, after 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, and Oman hopes its crews will qualify for the dinghy and wind-surfing events, a stepping stone on the way to its first medals in 2024.
We sped out to tiny, uninhabited Green Island – "the office", joked our instructor, Irene – on a stomach-churningly bumpy motorised dinghy.
We hired a sailing dinghy for an hour or two, shrieking and screaming at each other, and then pulled the launch on to a beach to doze for a while.
"I'm a risk, I know, although why anyone would think I would want to steal a bicycle!" It's funny, he says, that he had to sell his beloved car in Syria to raise cash for a leaky dinghy in Turkey and then a bike nobody else wants in Greece.
The rest of the time you are free to enjoy long, languid days sailing between islands and landing your dinghy on deserted beaches.
That said, lessons were interspersed with good lunches at anchor, snorkelling and swimming off the boat, breaks on silky white beaches and motoring ashore by dinghy to fine beachside restaurants for conch fritters, mahi mahi, and mango salsa in the evenings.
But instead of measuring cornering forces and suspension movement they look at wind speed, yaw, rudder angles and sundry other factors that affect the performance of a racing yacht or dinghy.
Police outside the Taj Mahal, India's most famous hotel, lapped by the Arabian Sea, said gunmen arrived there by inflatable dinghy.
As a rule he observed from afar as "his boys" blew up the American base at Khobar in Saudi Arabia, or the USS Cole in Yemen (he wrote a poem about that, the little dinghy bobbing on the waves) or the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, where in 1998 more than 200 died.
He is believed to be the sole survivor of a team of ten militants which landed in Mumbai by inflatable dinghy and attacked a variety of targets, including two hotels, with guns and grenades.
Instead he led expeditions to the Newfoundland pack-ice, where he daubed baby seals with paint to make their pelts worthless, and to the whaling grounds of the Pacific, where, as he bobbed in a dinghy in front of the Russian fleet, his hair was neatly parted by a Soviet harpoon.
