boat

English

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boat

A boat kept on land

Etymology

From Middle English bot, boot, boet, boyt (“boat”), from Old English bāt (“boat”), from Proto-West Germanic *bait, from Proto-Germanic *baitaz, *baitą (“boat, small ship”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰeyd- (“to break, split”). Cognate with Old Norse beit (“boat”), Middle Dutch beitel (“little boat”).

Old Norse bátr (whence Icelandic bátur, Norwegian båt, Danish båd), Dutch boot, German Boot, Occitan batèl and French bateau are all ultimately borrowings from the Old English word.

Pronunciation

(Received Pronunciation) enPR: bōt, IPA^(key): /bəʊt/
Rhymes: -əʊt
(General American) enPR: bōt, IPA^(key): /boʊt/
Audio (US): (file)
Audio (General Australian): (file)

Noun

boat (plural boats)

A craft used for transportation of goods, fishing, racing, recreational cruising, or military use on or in the water, propelled by oars or outboard motor or inboard motor or by wind.
- 1910, Emerson Hough, chapter II, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
  Carried somehow, somewhither, for some reason, on these surging floods, were these travelers, […]. Even such a boat as the Mount Vernon offered a total deck space so cramped as to leave secrecy or privacy well out of the question, even had the motley and democratic assemblage of passengers been disposed to accord either.
- 1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VIII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y., London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:
  Philander went into the next room […] and came back with a salt mackerel […] . Next he put the mackerel in a fry-pan, and the shanty began to smell like a Banks boat just in from a v'yage.
- 2013 August 3, “Yesterday’s fuel”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847:
  The dawn of the oil age was fairly recent. Although the stuff was used to waterproof boats in the Middle East 6,000 years ago, extracting it in earnest began only in 1859 after an oil strike in Pennsylvania. The first barrels of crude fetched $18 (around $450 at today’s prices).
(poker slang) A full house.
A vehicle, utensil, or dish somewhat resembling a boat in shape.
a stone boat; a gravy boat
(organic chemistry, physical chemistry) One of two possible conformations of cyclohexane rings (the other being chair), shaped roughly like a boat.
(Australian politics, informal) The refugee boats arriving in Australian waters, and by extension, refugees generally.
(The addition of quotations indicative of this usage is being sought:)
(cellular automata) In Conway’s Game of Life, a particular still life consisting of a dead cell surrounded by five living cells.
- 1994 May 7, David Bell, “HighLife - An Interesting Variant of Life (part 1/3)”, in comp.theory.cell-automata‎^[1] (Usenet):
  It creates 4 blocks, a boat, and a glider every 768 generations.
- 2004 May 24, Paul Chapman, “A Prototype Programmable Universal Constructor for Conway's Life”, in comp.theory.cell-automata‎^[2] (Usenet):
  The program is represented as a string of boats (1s) and blocks (0s).
- 2005 February 23, Dave Greene, “exist glider gun able of reconstruction in Life?”, in comp.theory.cell-automata‎^[3] (Usenet):
  For many stable patterns, by the way, there are other input glider lanes where the gliders are caught and turned into boats, which are then cleanly deleted by another glider coming in on the same lane.
Alternative form of BOAT

Usage notes

There is no explicit limit, but the word boat usually refers to a relatively small watercraft, smaller than a ship but larger than a dinghy. It is also the normal designation for a submarine (however large), and also for lakers (ships used in the Great Lakes trade in North America).