Word.ws English Dictionary

all hands on deck

all hands on deck interjection: an order, on board ship, for all seamen of all watches to muster on deck immediately; normally shortened to "All hands".

Interjection

  1. An order, on board ship, for all seamen of all watches to muster on deck immediately; normally shortened to "All hands"
    • As soon as the boche and his guard were aboard again, I called all hands on deck, including von Schoenvorts, and there I explained to them that the time had come for us to enter into some sort of an agreement among ourselves that would relieve us of the annoyance and embarrassment of being divided...1918, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Chapter V”, in The Land That Time Forgot
  2. (broadly) A call for everyone to participate in something.
    • It was all hands to the deck in the Swindon penalty box.2000 March 12, Stuart Barnes, “Swindon stunner for Curbishley”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
    • Summer, with its good weather and accompanying onslaught of tourists, was the time when they made most of their money for the year, and so it was all hands on deck.2015, Marie Bostwick, The Second Sister

Synonyms of all hands on deck

Forms of all hands on deck

alternative formall hands to the deck

Questions about all hands on deck

What does all hands on deck mean?
All hands on deck means an order, on board ship, for all seamen of all watches to muster on deck immediately; normally shortened to "All hands".
What part of speech is all hands on deck?
All hands on deck is an interjection.

Words near all hands on deck in the dictionary

  1. All Hallows
  2. All Hallows Eve
  3. All Hallows' Day
  4. All Hallows' Eve
  5. all hands
  6. all hands on deck
  7. all hands to the deck
  8. all hands to the pump
  9. all hat and no cattle
  10. all hat and no cowboy
  11. all hat, no ranch

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: all hands on deck (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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