Word.ws English Dictionary

boat people

boat people noun: refugees fleeing by sea, particularly those fleeing from South Vietnam during the 1970s and '80s. Also the plural of boat person.

Noun

boat people pl (normally plural, singular boat person)

  1. (historical, plural, plural-normally) Refugees fleeing by sea, particularly those fleeing from South Vietnam during the 1970s and '80s.
    • Indochinese refugees, known throughout the world as the “boat people,” were subject to horrific suffering and dangers when the Vietnamese government began expelling them after the fall of Saigon.2010, Walter Mondale, David Hage, The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics, Scribner, →ISBN, →OCLC, →OL, page 184e
  2. (plural, plural-normally) An ethnic group that principally lives on fishing and houseboats, particularly the Tanka or Dan people of East Asia.

Also used as

boat people is also the plural of boat person.

boat people meaning in Vietnamese

boat people in Vietnamese

refugees fleeing by sea
người thuyền nhân

Forms of boat people

singularboat person

Questions about boat people

What does boat people mean?
Boat people means refugees fleeing by sea, particularly those fleeing from South Vietnam during the 1970s and '80s.
What is boat people in Vietnamese?
Boat people in Vietnamese is người thuyền nhân. See Boat people meaning in Vietnamese.
What part of speech is boat people?
Boat people is a noun.

Words near boat people in the dictionary

  1. boat necklines
  2. Boat of Garten
  3. boat orchid
  4. boat park
  5. boat parks
  6. boat people
  7. boat person
  8. boat persons
  9. boat race
  10. boat races
  11. boat ramp

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: boat people (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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Cite this entry: “boat people.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/boat_people. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.