“Flotilla” comes from Spanish, where “flota” means “fleet” and the suffix “-illa” turns it into a diminutive. So in the original Spanish, “flotilla” is a small fleet of ships, and that’s how it originally came into English in the 18th century — referring to a group of ships smaller than a full fleet. Famously, the 16th-century Spanish Armada was made up of many groups of flotilla. In more modern times, a flotilla of civilian boats known as the Little Ships of Dunkirk rescued 336,000 British and French soldiers who were trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk in May and June 1940.