I was leafing through my copy of A Seaman’s Pocket-Book, published by the Lord’s Commissioners of the Admiralty (June 1943 edition), as one does. The word ‘avast’ caught my eye and I thought it might be of some interest to fleetingly mention the usage of ‘avast’ in the context of its use by the Royal Navy. An example is “Avast lowering after fall” which means to cease lowering the rope which is taking the aft (back-end) weight of a boat being transferred from water to ship or vice versa.
In other words ‘avast’ in British nautical usage means stop or cease and is a most appropriate name for an anti-malware product. It is a happy coincidence and also a pleasant irony that a company in the land-locked nation of the Czech Republic should, quite independently of archaic British seamen’s language, coin a word which is so practically meaningful in the context of that company’s mission.