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boat

Pronunciation: /bəʊ̯t/

The English word “boat” has 15 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A small, usually open craft used for travelling over water, propelled by oars, motor or wind. Usually contrasted with "ship".
  2. A submarine.
  3. A large, ocean-going ship.
  4. A shallow jug used to serve sauces or other liquid foods.
  5. A vessel used to store the incense to be burned during a service; an incense boat.
  6. A full house.
  7. A car, especially a large or heavy one.
  8. One of two possible conformations of cyclohexane rings (the other being chair), shaped roughly like a boat.
  9. The face (compare boat race).
  10. The refugee boats arriving in Australian waters, and by extension, refugees generally.
  11. In Conway’s Game of Life, a particular still life consisting of a dead cell surrounded by five living cells.

verb

  1. To travel by boat.
  2. To transport in a boat.
  3. To transport (deport to a penal colony).
  4. To place in a boat.

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”) (whence also fissure via Latin). Cognate with Old Norse beit (“boat”), Middle Dutch beitel (“little boat”). Old Norse bátr (whence Faroese and Icelandic bátur, Norwegian…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.