from around 1500 both as a general term for oared warships, and from the Middle Ages and onward more specifically for the Mediterranean-style vessel. It was only from the 16th century that a unified galley concept came in use. Before that, particularly in antiquity, there was a wide variety of terms used for different types of galleys. In modern historical literature, galley is occasionally used as a general term for various types of oared vessels larger than boats, though the "true" galley is defined as the ships belonging to the Mediterranean tradition. Ancient galleys were named according to the number of oars, the number of banks of oars or lines of rowers. The terms are based on contemporary language use combined with more recent compounds of Greek and Latin words. The earliest Greek single-banked galleys are called triaconters (from triakontoroi, "thirty-oars") and penteconters (pentēkontoroi, "fifty-oars"). For later galleys with more than one row of oars, the terminology is based on Latin numerals with the suffix -reme from rēmus, "oar". A monoreme has one bank of oars, a bireme two, and a trireme three. Since the maximum banks of oars was three, any expansion above that did not refer to additional banks of oars, but of additional rowers for every oar. Quinquereme (quintus + rēmus) was literally a "five-oar", but actually meant that there were several rowers to certain banks of oars which made up five lines of oar handlers. For simplicity, they have by many modern scholars been referred to as "fives", "sixes", "eights", "elevens", etc. Anything above six or seven rows of rowers was not common, though even a very exceptional "forty" is attested in contemporary source. Any galley with more than three or four lines of rowers is often referred to as a "polyreme". Classicist Lionel Casson has applied the term "galley" to oared Viking ships of the Early and High Middle Ages, both their well known longship warships and their less familiar merchant galleys. Oared military vessels built on the British Isles in the 11th to 13th centuries were based on Scandinavian designs, but were nevertheless referred to as "galleys". Many of them were similar to birlinns (a smaller version of the Highland galley), close relatives of longship types like the snekkja. By the 14th century, they were replaced with balingers in southern Britain while longship-type Highland and Irish galleys and birlinns remained in use throughout the