•A novel mechanical Power Take-off with compact design for wave energy converters.•Using Mechanical Motion Rectifier mechanism to improve the power absorption.•Dry lab bench test matched well with the theoretical analysis.•Achieved up to 81.2% of efficiency in dry lab test and 62.4% in wave tank test. Power Take-off (PTO) is one of the most critical components in the field of ocean wave energy conversion. This paper introduces a novel compact mechanical PTO using a ball screw mechanism and a Mechanical Motion Rectifier (MMR) to improve the energy conversion performance. The proposed MMR PTO converts the bidirectional oscillatory motion of the ocean waves into the unidirectional rotation. The detailed design and working principle of the MMR PTO are explicitly explained. Dynamic analysis is presented for the three most important factors that influence the performance, including the equivalent mass, the equivalent damping, and the excitation frequency. The analytical relationship between these factors and the disengaged freewheeling motion caused by the MMR mechanism is derived, and the analytical solution is verified through dry lab testing. Experimental results in bench tests show that compared with the traditional linear PTO which uses the ball screw to drive the generator directly, the MMR PTO is more efficient because of the unique freewheeling motion, achieving a maximum 81.2% energy transfer efficiency. After integrating the prototyped PTO with a single-body point absorber type of wave energy converter, the testing in a water tank show that the MMR PTO can achieve total efficiency up to 62.4%, showing promising potential for real applications.