Pre-dreadnought is a retrospective label, and it can mislead when treated as a precise contemporary category. Some ships now placed in that group came after HMS Dreadnought because their designers had not known the new type was coming. They spoke of a steam battleship or a Sovereign-style battleship. The distinction separates later classification from what designers believed they were building at the time.
Notable Point · 12:30-12:54
Why pre-dreadnought is a retrospective label
Some ships now called pre-dreadnoughts came after HMS Dreadnought because the term is a later classification that their designers did not use.