Word.ws English Dictionary

before the mast

before the mast adjective: having living quarters in the forecastle of a vessel.

Adjective

before the mast (not comparable)

  1. (literally) Having living quarters in the forecastle of a vessel
  2. Describing seamen rather than officers
    • Before making lieutenant, he sailed before the mast for five years
    • [...] but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground) the command of the ship’s deck is also his; therefore the grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their professional...1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “chapter 33”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC

Questions about before the mast

What does before the mast mean?
Before the mast means having living quarters in the forecastle of a vessel.
What part of speech is before the mast?
Before the mast is an adjective.

Words near before the mast in the dictionary

  1. before one's eyes
  2. before someone's time
  3. before the fact
  4. before the ink had time to dry
  5. before the ink was dry
  6. before the mast
  7. before times
  8. before you can say Jack Robertson
  9. before you can say Jack Robinson
  10. before you can say knife
  11. before't

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: before the mast (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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