Admiral began as an Arabic title, and it lost its tail
Western navies borrowed their top rank from Arabic. Admiral traces back to amir, a commander or prince, plus al, meaning the; the fuller phrase Amir al-Bahr means prince of the sea. Somewhere along the way European speakers kept only the front half of the phrase and slipped in an extra letter d.
In English the word arrived via Anglo-French amiral, meaning commander, and Medieval Latin admiralis. Its root, amir, covers a wide spread of meanings: king, prince, chief, governor or anyone ruling over others. An 1818 edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary even suggested the second half came from an obscure Greek word for the sea, and quoted a 1599 Spanish dictionary claiming almiralle was Arabic for a king.
A rival theory points to Norman Sicily, a formerly Arab-ruled island where Greek, Arab and Norman cultures mixed. There Roger II employed George of Antioch, a Greek Christian who had commanded fleets for North African Muslim rulers, and honoured him in Abbasid style as Amir of Amirs. By the 13th century that title had been Latinized as ammiratus ammiratorum. Sicilians and Genoese then fused the first two parts into one word, amiral.
From there the spelling wandered. Portuguese and Spanish turned it into almirante, while Latin-influenced speakers added the d, producing admyrall in 14th-century English and admiral by the 16th century. The resemblance to admire is an accident of that inserted letter. Ancient Greek had its own naval term, nauarchos, used by Plutarch, but it plays no part in the English word's history.
The old Arabic meaning still surfaces. At a change of command aboard the carrier USS Enterprise in Bahrain on 24 May 2012, General James Mattis introduced Vice Admiral Mark Fox as the prince of the sea, emir of the sea, translating the title back from Arabic. Today admiral is one of the highest naval ranks in many navies, equal to a full general, sitting above vice admiral and below admiral of the fleet.
Source: Admiral
